19 KiB
Localization parity with Microsoft Word
Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-11 · Change: trivial (Turkish interface catalog completed, 2,325 entries, #774; previously minor: Turkish interface catalog completed, 2,325 entries, #774; previously minor: Hungarian interface added; previously trivial: sorting and table numbers follow the text's language, #836, #837; previously minor: Polish interface; Polish proofing — spelling, grammar, hyphenation — and a proofing language per run; previously minor: Turkish interface added; previously major: first version; catalogs measured from
crates/ui-egui/src/i18n, Word's languages from its bundle listing) · Target: Microsoft Word (Microsoft 365) for Mac 16.113.4
Interface languages, script support and proofing per language. How translation works (catalog
format, adding a language, clean-room rule): crates/ui-egui/src/i18n/mod.rs.
Dimension: ~28% (estimated; 27% before Portuguese proofing, 25% before Polish and per-run proofing languages), 70–115 h to full for the twelve key languages plus ~45 h for the other ~17 languages Word ships, plus native-speaker review (human).
What Word ships (measured by listing the bundle)
- 30 interface languages (31
.lprojfolders incl. Base): ar, cs, da, de, el, en, en-GB, es, es-MX, fi, fr, fr-CA, he, hu, id, it, ja, ko, nl, no, pl, pt (BR), pt-PT, ru, sk, sv, th, tr, zh-CN, zh-TW. Arabic and Hebrew get a mirrored interface. No Hindi or Vietnamese interface on Mac. - 120 proofing tools (
SharedSupport/Proofing Tools): spellers for ~50 languages, grammar checkers for ~20, hyphenators for ~16, thesauri for ~20.
What WordCraft ships (measured)
- 19 interface languages: English plus
zh-hans,zh-hant,ja,uk,es,pt-br, Serbiansr/sr-latn(#250), Estonianet, Turkishtr, Russianru, Italianit(#594), Germande(#574), Polishpl, Czechcs, Hungarianhu, Frenchfrand Bulgarianbg. Catalogs have 2,021–2,419 entries each; Polish has every key of every other catalog except the style names and equation gallery labels only Russian, Italian, Hungarian, Turkish and Bulgarian translate so far (a test checks it). A test (every_tab_and_command_is_translated) enforces that every ribbon tab, command label and ribbon location is translated in every language.pl,pl-PLandpl_PL.UTF-8system locales pick Polish automatically. - Of the 675 English strings a scan extracts from
tl!(…)calls and command labels/locations, each catalog covers 661 (98%). Some newer dialog and pane strings (Equation tab tooltips, Zotero, Read Aloud, Backstage greetings) aren't wrapped intl!yet, so they show in English in every language: the true share of visible strings is ~93–95% (estimated). - Pending PRs: Norwegian Bokmål (#208) and Nynorsk (#210), Hebrew with RTL (#20).
- Proofing: English, Polish and Portuguese, chosen per run from its language (
w:lang, resolved through the styles; Review › Language and the status bar set it). Languages without proofing tools get no spelling or grammar marks (as in Word without the language's tools) instead of being flagged as English. Detail in Proofing per language. - Document scripts: shaping via HarfRust (HarfBuzz port) for every script; bidi (UAX #9) and Arabic shaping tested (#207); IME on all desktop platforms (winit fixes pending, #155–#164).
The twelve key languages
Status: full = every user-visible string translated and the script renders and edits correctly;
partial; menus only; none. Hours are to full, Opus 5.5 agent wall-clock, excluding the
shared items below.
| Language | Code | UI strings translated | Dialogs / tooltips / help | Script support | Native review | Status | Hours to full |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| English | en | source (100%) | ✅ | Latin ✅ | yes | full | 0 |
| Simplified Chinese (Mandarin) | zh-hans | 929 entries; 98% of extracted, ~95% of visible | most; newer panes English | CJK ✅, IME ✅; Windows UI font fixed (#248); interface font chain covers every catalog character, installed CJK font after the embedded ones when it doesn't, PingFang found on macOS 12 (#486); font list by Chinese names (宋体, 微软雅黑, #505); no vertical text | no | partial | 3–5 |
| Spanish | es | ~930; 98% / ~95% | most | Latin ✅ | no | partial | 1–2 |
| Hindi | hi | 0 | ❌ | Devanagari shaping via HarfRust, untested; no hyphenation | no | none | 4–6 |
| Arabic | ar | 0 | ❌ | shaping, joining, lam-alef, bidi ✅ (#207); no kashida; no mirrored UI | no | none | 6–8 |
| French | fr | 2,033 entries | most; newer dialogs partly English | Latin ✅ | no | partial | 1–2 |
| Portuguese | pt-br (pt-PT none) | ~930; 98% / ~95% (pt-BR) | most | Latin ✅ | no | partial | 2–4 (pt-BR finish + pt-PT) |
| Indonesian | id | 0 | ❌ | Latin ✅ | no | none | 3–4 |
| Japanese | ja | ~930; 98% / ~95% | most | CJK ✅, IME ✅; no vertical text, ruby or document grid | no | partial | 3–5 |
| German | de | 2,021 entries; same key set as zh-hans (#574); 98% of extracted, ~95% of visible | most | Latin ✅ | no | partial | 1–2 |
| Korean | ko | 0 | ❌ | Hangul ✅; macOS Korean IME fixes pending (#163, #164) | no | none | 3–5 |
| Vietnamese | vi | 0 | ❌ | Latin with stacked diacritics, untested | no | none | 3–4 |
Other shipped languages: 13 — Traditional Chinese (zh-hant), Ukrainian (uk), Serbian
Cyrillic and Latin (sr, sr-latn, #250), Estonian (et), Turkish (tr), Russian (ru), Italian (it, #594), Polish (pl), Czech (cs), Hungarian (hu), French (fr) and Bulgarian (bg), all partial.
Estonian uses the existing fonts, follows et-EE system locales, and is available in Options or
through ui.language with {"value":"et"}. Its 1,307 entries cover the existing interface catalog.
Estonian spelling, grammar, dates and document templates are not added by the interface catalog.
Turkish works the same way (tr-TR and tr-CY system locales, {"value":"tr"}) with all 2,325
entries, the same keys as the Russian catalog. Command search folds the Turkish dotted and dotless I (italik finds İtalik, YAZI TİPİ
finds Yazı Tipi) while English labels and ASCII command ids keep their usual matching. Turkish
proofing is not included; terminology and checks: localization-tr.md.
Bulgarian (bg-BG system locales, {"value":"bg"}) has 2,419 entries: every key of the reference
catalog, the equation gallery's labels and everything the interface audit finds (the audit checks
Bulgarian as it does Russian). Counts use count-neutral wording (Думи: 21). Bulgarian text is
hyphenated by the Bulgarian syllable rules (#826); Bulgarian spelling and grammar are not included.
Hungarian follows hu-HU system locales and {"value":"hu"}, with a complete catalog of 2,419 entries: every key of
the Russian catalog, built-in style names shown translated, plus the citation style names. Hungarian proofing is not included; terminology and conventions:
localization-hu.md.
Polish is the only one besides English with proofing tools, and a Polish interface writes new
documents in Polish (pl-PL).
Proofing per language
| Language | Spelling | Suggestions | Grammar | Hyphenation |
|---|---|---|---|---|
English (en, any region; text with no language) |
Moby word list (public domain, ~160k words) with inflection rules | edit distance | repeated word, a/an, sentence capital, space before punctuation, double space |
Moby dictionary, our Liang patterns, heuristic |
Polish (pl) |
The Hunspell pl_PL dictionary installed on the system (OS package, Homebrew, LibreOffice, or the WORDCRAFT_DICTIONARIES folder; not bundled, so no Polish spelling marks without it), read at runtime by a Hunspell-style affix engine (crates/proof/src/affix.rs); names capitalized, compounds part by part, Kennedy'ego |
missing diacritics first (zolw → żółw), the dictionary's confusion table (żeka → rzeka, chuśtawka → huśtawka), missing space (napewno → na pewno), one typo, then a stem scan within two typos |
Polish messages: repeated word, space before punctuation, double space, sentence capital (knows np., r., initials, ordinals, dialogue dashes), missing comma before że/który/ponieważ/gdyż/aby/żeby/jeśli/jeżeli/gdyby/lecz (not after mimo, chyba, tak, prepositions…), we/ze (we wtorek, ze szkoły), doubled punctuation |
TeX Polish patterns (Kołodziejska, Jackowski, Ryćko; MIT option) with their 20 exception words; a Polish syllable heuristic for letters outside the alphabet |
Portuguese (pt, any region) |
The Hunspell pt_BR dictionary installed on the system — VERO and its derivatives (same places as Polish; not bundled, LGPL/MPL), read at runtime by the same affix engine, which reads its FLAG UTF-8, 106 flags, continuation classes and FORBIDDENWORD spellings; names capitalized, compounds part by part (guarda-roupa, ex-marido) |
missing accents first (coraçao → coração, saude → saúde), the dictionary's confusion table (seje → seja, excessão → exceção), missing space (nãoé → não é), one typo, then an accent-folding stem scan |
Portuguese messages: repeated word (the emphatic doubles are allowed), space before punctuation, double space, sentence capital (knows etc., pág., Dr., initials, ordinals, dialogue dashes), doubled punctuation; no comma rule — que opens a clause only sometimes |
TeX Portuguese patterns (Rezende, Almeida, Araujo, Benevides; BSD 3-clause) with their 2 exception words |
| Any other | — (no marks) | — | — | the English patterns, as before |
Measured with the SJP.PL dictionary: every one of the ~4.5 million forms an independent expansion of its affix file produces is accepted, and 200,000 one-edit mutations that aren't words are all rejected; a check takes ~1 µs, a suggestion list 1–35 ms (release build). Not yet: other languages' dictionaries, a thesaurus for Polish, Word's style and clarity refinements, Polish-specific AutoCorrect.
Italian (it, #594) follows it, it-IT and it-CH system locales. Its catalog has every key of
the others plus 51 strings that are wrapped in tl! but were in no catalog yet (File › Info
properties, the File › Home greeting, list levels, Equation tab gallery and tooltips). Ribbon tabs,
groups and command names use the names Italian Word users know (feature names, as AGENTS.md
allows); all other text is written from the meaning of the English. No Italian proofing yet.
Sorting and numbers in the text's language
Sorts follow the alphabet of the text's language (w:lang, else the document default):
Table › Sort, Home › Sort, the index and its letter headings, the bibliography and the Table of
Authorities. Letters with diacritics sort with their base letter (é with e) unless the
language makes them letters of their own: Polish ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż, Czech/Slovak č ch ř š ž
(and Slovak ä ô), Hungarian cs dz dzs gy ly ny sz ty zs ö ü, Swedish/Finnish å ä ö and
Danish/Norwegian æ ø å after z, Spanish ñ, Turkish, Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian Latin,
Romanian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovenian and Icelandic (crates/doc/src/collate.rs,
a hand-written per-language alphabet table; full CLDR collation is not used). Table sort and
table formulas read numbers with the language's decimal and group separators (1 250,50 in
Polish, 1.250,50 in German, 1,250.50 in English) and write formula results with its decimal
separator (crates/doc/src/locale_number.rs). Interface lists (styles, fonts) still sort by code
point.
Region conventions (#838)
As in Word, a new blank document takes its paper from the system region, not the interface
language: US Letter in the territories CLDR lists for it (US, Canada, Mexico, the Philippines,
Chile, Colombia, Venezuela and a few Central American ones), A4 everywhere else. Lengths are shown
in inches in the US (and Liberia, Myanmar) and centimetres elsewhere, written with the region's
decimal separator (2,54 cm in Poland, Germany, France…); fields take either separator and any
unit (1 in in a centimetre field). An explicit File › Options › Advanced › Measurement units
choice still wins; its Automatic entry follows the region again.
Where the region comes from:
- File › Options › Advanced › Region (saved; agents:
file.options {"region": "pl-PL"},autoreturns to the system's); - else
WORDCRAFT_REGIONorLC_ALL; - else, on Unix, each convention from its own locale: numbers from
LC_NUMERIC(elseLANG), paper fromLC_PAPER, measurement fromLC_MEASUREMENT; - else the platform's preferred locale: the macOS preferred locale (
en-PL), the browser's language on the web, and on Windows the home location (Settings › Time & language › Region) with the display language. Word follows Windows' regional format instead, so an en-US format set by someone living in Germany gives A4 and a decimal comma here; reading the regional format needs Win32 calls that areunsafein Rust, which WordCraft forbids.
Runs without preferences (WORDCRAFT_NO_PREFS) stay en-US unless WORDCRAFT_REGION is set, so
agents and screenshots give the same result on every machine. The decimal separator belongs to
the language's own number format (CLDR): a decimal-comma language uses a comma everywhere except
where CLDR says otherwise (de-CH), and English, whose en-XX locales follow the territory, uses a
comma in decimal-comma territories (en-DE, en-PL). Other decimal-point languages keep the point
in any territory (ja-PL is 2.54 cm), as CLDR's fallback to the language gives.
Templates (Letter, Resume, Report) keep their own size. Not yet: Word's "Default paper size" preference of its own, and Word's locale-specific Normal margins (2,5 cm in some regions; WordCraft keeps 2,54 cm).
Shared work (not in the per-language hours)
| Item | Hours | Notes |
|---|---|---|
Wrap the remaining English literals in tl! and translate them in every catalog |
4–6 | Makes the six partial languages full except script items |
| Mirrored (right-to-left) interface for Arabic and Hebrew | 15–25 | Ribbon, panes, dialogs, rulers |
| Vertical text, ruby, document grid (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) | counted in layout-parity.md | |
| Proofing dictionaries, grammar and hyphenation for the 11 non-English key languages | 20–40 | Open dictionaries only (licence check per dictionary); issues #25, #40, #100. Per-run languages, the Hunspell-style affix engine and the TeX pattern reader landed with Polish, so a language with an open Hunspell dictionary and hyphenation patterns is mostly data plus grammar rules |
| Native-speaker review of every catalog | human | None reviewed yet |
Revision history
| Date | Change | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Turkish interface catalog completed (2,325 entries, the same keys as Russian): equation gallery, built-in style names, watermarks, paper sizes and preview tiles; the interface audit checks Turkish too (#774) |
| 2026-10-12 | trivial | Region conventions: File › Options › Advanced › Region (saved) and an Automatic units entry; Unix LC_PAPER/LC_MEASUREMENT/LC_NUMERIC each decide their own convention; the web reads the browser's locale; WORDCRAFT_NO_PREFS runs stay en-US; where the decimal separator comes from (#838 review) |
| 2026-10-12 | minor | New blank documents follow the system region: A4 outside the Letter territories, centimetres outside the US, the region's decimal separator in length fields; explicit Measurement units choice wins (#838) |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Czech (cs) interface catalog added |
| 2026-10-12 | minor | Portuguese proofing: pt-BR spelling from the installed VERO dictionary (the affix engine grew FLAG UTF-8, 128 flag bits, continuation classes and FORBIDDENWORD), accent-first suggestions, conservative grammar with Portuguese messages, TeX Portuguese hyphenation patterns (BSD 3-clause); Review › Language offers Português (Brasil); a pt-br interface writes pt-BR documents; dimension ~27% → ~28% |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Polish interface (13 languages) and Polish proofing: SJP.PL spelling with suggestions, Polish grammar rules, TeX Polish hyphenation; proofing language per run; dimension ~25% → ~27% |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | German interface catalog (#574): 2,021 entries covering the full zh-hans key set; locale, saved-preference and bundled-font tests; no German proofing |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Italian interface catalog (#594), locale selection, saved preference and font coverage checks; count labels put the noun first so they read right at 1 |
| 2026-10-12 | minor | Language-aware sorting (tables, paragraphs, index, bibliography, Table of Authorities) and table numbers/formulas in the text's language (#836, #837) |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Font dialog sets the Asian text font (w:eastAsia) and the Latin text font separately; the Asian list holds the installed Chinese, Japanese and Korean fonts by their interface-language names (#505) |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | French interface catalog (2,033 entries, @pechnikov2026-star), fr-* system locales, saved preference and font coverage checks; no French proofing |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Font list shows installed fonts by their names in the interface language (宋体 for SimSun in Chinese, Japanese and Korean names likewise) and finds them by either name; a Chinese, Japanese or Korean font is stored as w:eastAsia too (#505) |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Chinese/Japanese interface fonts: a test checks every catalog character has a glyph; an installed CJK font follows the embedded faces whenever they miss one; macOS font asset folders searched for PingFang (#486) |
| 2026-10-10 | minor | Russian interface (#300; 1,524 entries, built-in style names shown translated; covers everything the interface audit finds) |
| 2026-10-12 | minor | Bulgarian interface catalog (2,419 entries), locale selection, saved preference, audit coverage and font checks |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Hungarian interface catalog (2,419 entries, built-in style names shown translated; covers everything the interface audit finds), locale selection, saved preference and font coverage checks |
| 2026-10-11 | minor | Turkish interface catalog (1,307 entries), locale selection, saved preference, Turkish casing in command search and font coverage checks; catalog sizes re-counted |
| 2026-10-11 | trivial | English spelling (#520): our supplement assets/spelling/en-extra.txt adds ~220 common modern words the Moby list lacks ("desktop", "download", "email"…) |
| 2026-10-10 | minor | Estonian interface catalog, locale selection, saved preference and font coverage checks; count labels put the noun first so they read right at 1 |
| 2026-10-10 | minor | Serbian (Cyrillic and Latin) interface merged (#250) |
| 2026-10-10 | major | First version: twelve-language table, catalog coverage measured, Word's 30 UI languages and 120 proofing tools listed |