Localization parity

Last reviewed: 2026-10-14 · Last updated: 2026-10-23 · Change: minor (Georgian: menus, panels and effect names; missing strings show in English; missing_translations_report lists them) · Target: Adobe After Effects 2026

How much of Anima's interface is translated, language by language, compared with After Effects. gaps.md gap 16 and workstream G9 hold the work; target-app-parity.md the overall numbers.

What After Effects ships

The installed After Effects 2026 (26.5.0.89) bundle has 11 .lproj localisations: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese (zh_CN) and Traditional Chinese (zh_TW). Each translates the whole interface, including effect names and parameters. It ships no Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian or Vietnamese interface; Arabic and Hebrew text in layers is supported through its Middle Eastern text engine.

How Anima translates

• Menus: crates/ui-egui/src/i18n.rs, one catalog per language keyed by (command, English label) (624 catalog rows each at 470ea7a3, counted). A test (menu_catalogs_have_no_stale_or_duplicate_rows) fails on a row whose entry left the menu tree or on a repeated row. The generated Effect menu is not part of that fixed tree: its entries and category submenus take their labels from the effect catalog below.
• Panels, dialogs, buttons, tooltips: crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/ui.rs, keyed by the English source string, with English fallback. Catalogs exist for Japanese (410 rows), Simplified and Traditional Chinese (506 each), Ukrainian (505), Brazilian Portuguese (400) and Czech (501); counted at 470ea7a3. Georgian has every row the Chinese catalogs have at this revision (695, as both Chinese catalogs now have), plus 191 for panels converted to the catalog.
• Effect names: crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/effects.rs, keyed by effect id, in Simplified Chinese and Georgian (307 rows, one per effect in the registry, plus its 21 categories). The registry's English name stays the effect's identity: effect.list, effect.apply {"effect": …}, scripts and expressions match on it, and the property tree stores it as the effect group's name. Only the drawing — the Effect menu, Effect Controls, the Timeline and Effects & Presets — goes through the catalog, so a project file is identical whichever interface language opens it. A repeat (Gaussian Blur 2) keeps the index the engine appends, and a group the user renamed in Effect Controls stays verbatim. Adding a language there is two tables and one arm, and no panel changes: Traditional Chinese and Japanese have their tables in place and empty, so those languages draw English until a translator fills them (the Japanese set for #821 is what that slot is for). Each language decides for itself which names stay English — Adobe's Japanese interface leaves the CC, VR and OCIO sets in English while its Chinese one translates them — so a row repeating the English name is a choice, not a missing row.
• Missing strings: a string with no row in the interface language shows in English, and no test, build or release fails on a missing translation. The missing_translations_report test (crates/ui-egui/src/i18n.rs) prints, per language, the fixed menu entries, panel strings, effect names and effect categories that have no row. It always passes; cargo xtask ci runs it with --nocapture, so the list is in the gate log. Locally: cargo test -p anima-ui-egui --lib missing_translations_report -- --nocapture.
• Not translated anywhere yet: effect parameter names (≈ 1,650, crates/effects), engine-generated text (property names, errors, undo labels), the Home screen's unwrapped literals (#574), Learn tutorials and documentation.
• Language choice: Settings ▸ General ▸ Language, or Match System (match_system_uses_the_system_language_where_there_is_a_catalog).
• Fonts: no bundled CJK font; the UI installs system fallbacks probed by script (Kana, Han, Arabic, Hebrew, Devanagari, Bengali, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Thai and Hangul: crates/ui-egui/src/theme.rs; the Hangul probe was added for #599, closed). The web build has no system fonts.
• Script support in the interface: egui draws text without complex shaping or right-to-left layout, so an Arabic or Hindi interface would render unshaped and left to right. In text layers (crates/text) shaping (harfrust), bidi (UAX #9), vertical text and Tate-Chu-Yoko work; text-layer typing goes through the IME (viewer_text.rs handles preedit and commit).

Measurement

Measured 10 October 2026 at origin/main 1446e27 and recounted on 12 October at upstream/main 470ea7a3 by counting catalog rows (const tables in crates/ui-egui/src/i18n.rs and i18n/ui.rs; menu rows 624 per language, so the share is computed from 624 rather than 618). The denominator, ≈ 3,900 user-visible strings, was estimated on 10 October and is kept: 618 fixed menu entries + ≈ 1,320 capitalised UI literals in crates/ui-egui/src outside tests and catalogs (a regex count, so an upper bound) + ≈ 1,650 distinct effect parameter names + 306 effect names. Engine messages are not counted, so the true percentages are slightly lower.

Other languages Anima ships (4):

Russian (ru) has a menu catalog (624 rows, ≈ 16%); After Effects also ships Italian, which Anima does not (8–12 h).

Overall: ≈ 18%, the average coverage of After Effects' 10 non-English languages (Simplified and Traditional Chinese 29%, Japanese 27%, Brazilian Portuguese 26%, Spanish, French, German and Russian 16%, Korean and Italian 0%; 175 / 10, was ≈ 12% on 10 October). This is the localization row in target-app-parity.md.

Effort. One-time work first: route parameter names and engine messages through a catalog, wrap the remaining panel literals, and add a Hangul probe (10–20 h). Then each language needs ≈ 2,900 more strings (≈ 5–9 h per language at the pace of #398 and #401). Parity with After Effects' 10 non-English languages: ≈ 60–110 h; the four extra languages of the standard list (Hindi, Arabic, Indonesian, Vietnamese) add ≈ 50–80 h, most of it right-to-left layout and complex shaping in the interface. Every language needs native-speaker review, which only a human can give; only Georgian, contributed by a native speaker (#1843), has had it.

Revision history