filmcraft/docs/localization-parity.md

Localization parity

Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-13 · Change: minor (Korean covers the whole interface, #508) · Target: Adobe Premiere Pro 2026 (26.5.2)

Per-language status of FilmCraft's interface. Premiere 26.5.2 ships 10 interface languages (the installed bundle's .lproj folders): German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Simplified Chinese.

How it works

Edit ▸ Language (also Settings ▸ General, general.interfaceLanguage) switches the interface and persists across restarts; System Language (the default) follows the OS's or browser's preferred languages and falls back to English. Commands app.language.<english|japanese|spanish|portuguese|ukrainian|chinese|german|russian|french|indonesian|italian> are reachable over the control channel. One catalog per language, crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/<code>.tsv (format in the header of es.tsv); UI code wraps strings in tl!("…") / tlf!("…{name}", name), and registry names (effects and their parameters, settings, commands, panels, workspaces, presets) are translated where they are drawn. Searches match the displayed labels as well as English sources. Tests fail when a tl! literal, a menu label or a registry name has no Spanish entry; zh-cn.tsv must also cover every tl! literal and menu label; ja.tsv, fr.tsv and pt-br.tsv have the same entries but are not yet required by tests (French must cover the core menus, Brazilian Portuguese every menu label, and neither may keep an entry without a Spanish one). Engine error messages, the control channel, the CLI and MCP stay English.

Fonts come from craft-fonts (CRAFT_FONTS_DIR, all official releases) or an installed system face; without one, switching to Japanese or Chinese is refused with a message. Simplified Chinese is picked for zh, zh-CN, zh-SG, zh-Hans, not Traditional locales. Ukrainian uses the bundled Cyrillic interface fonts. Vertical text in titles is supported. The interface (egui) shapes each font run with harfrust and has Arabic and Hebrew fallback fonts (crates/ui-egui/src/rtl.rs), but it has no bidi pass: only captions (timeline blocks, the Text panel list when not being edited) are laid out in reading order, and the interface itself is never mirrored right to left. The title engine (crates/text, harfrust + bidi) lays out right to left, but Arabic titles are reported broken (#395).

Status

Measured 2026-10-10 by counting entries in each catalog. The denominator is the union of all catalogs' sources (3,498 strings); strings not yet wrapped in tl! and engine messages are not in it, so real coverage is somewhat lower than shown. Estimates calibrated from #449 (Japanese, whole interface, one PR) at ~4–8 h per language for the catalog plus tests.

Language	Code	UI strings	Dialogs / tooltips / help	Script support	Native review	Status	To full
English	en	3,498 (100%, source)	yes; no help docs in-app	Latin	n/a	full	—
Simplified Chinese	zh-cn	3,485 (99.6%)	dialogs, Settings, effects, shortcuts, status; engine errors English	CJK font fallback; system IME via winit	not recorded	partial	6–10 h + review
Spanish	es	3,496 (99.9%)	as above	Latin	not recorded	partial	4–8 h + review
Hindi	hi	0 (0%)	—	no Devanagari shaping in the interface	—	none	30–50 h (shaping in UI + catalog + fonts)
Arabic	ar	0 (0%)	—	no RTL interface layout; fallback fonts and shaping in the interface, captions in reading order, other text in egui's left-to-right run order; titles broken (#395)	—	none	40–70 h
French	fr	3,526 (same entries as Spanish, plus the macOS Settings item)	as Spanish	Latin (bundled fonts)	not recorded; welcome	partial (#498)	review
Portuguese (Brazil)	pt-br	3,541 (same entries as Spanish, plus the macOS Settings item)	as Spanish	Latin (bundled fonts)	not recorded; welcome	partial (#859)	review
Indonesian	id	3,541 (same entries as Spanish, plus the macOS Settings item); must cover the core menus, no entry without a Spanish one	as Spanish	Latin (bundled fonts); System Language also maps the legacy in code	not recorded; welcome	partial (#867)	review
Japanese	ja	3,487 (99.7%)	as zh-cn; system-font kanji may pick the Chinese fallback (#547)	CJK fonts, vertical title text	not recorded	partial	4–8 h + review
German	de	371 (10.6%)	menus only	Latin	yes (#630)	menus only	5–9 h + review
Korean	ko	3,573 (same entries as Spanish, plus the macOS Settings item)	as Spanish	installed system Hangul font (Malgun Gothic, Apple SD Gothic Neo, Noto Sans CJK KR…); refused without one	not recorded; welcome	partial (#508)	review; Hangul in craft-fonts for the web
Vietnamese	vi	0 (0%)	—	Latin with stacked diacritics (font coverage to check)	—	none	6–12 h + review
Other shipped: Italian	it	3,573 (same entries as Spanish, plus the macOS Settings item); must cover the core menus, no entry without a Spanish one	as Spanish	Latin (bundled fonts)	not recorded; welcome	partial	review
Other shipped: Ukrainian	uk	351 (10.0%)	menus only	Cyrillic (bundled)	not recorded	menus only	5–9 h

Premiere also ships Italian, which we now cover like Spanish, and Russian (6–10 h).

Localization dimension: 6 of the 12 key languages near-complete (English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, French, Portuguese (Brazil)), 1 menus-only, 5 none; against Premiere's 10 languages we cover 6 well and 1 partly. ~35%, 150–230 h for all twelve to full plus Italian and Russian, of which the script work (RTL and complex shaping in the egui interface) is the largest and least parallel part. Every language needs native-speaker review (human).

Revision history

Date	Change	Summary
2026-10-11	minor	German (de) ships the menus (#630): 371 of 3,498 strings (10.6%), native-reviewed; dimension now 2 menus-only, 5 none
2026-10-10	major	Created from ROADMAP.md's "Interface localization" section; catalog coverage measured (es 3,496, ja 3,487, zh-cn 3,485, pt-br 348, uk 351 of 3,498); the 12-language table and script-support gaps added