wordcraft/docs/localization-parity.md

Localization parity with Microsoft Word

Last reviewed: 2026-10-10 · Last updated: 2026-10-12 · Change: minor (Portuguese proofing: pt-BR spelling, suggestions, grammar and hyphenation from the installed VERO dictionary and TeX patterns; a pt-br interface now writes pt-BR documents; 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 .lproj folders 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)

• 18 interface languages: English plus zh-hans, zh-hant, ja, uk, es, pt-br, Serbian sr/sr-latn (#250), Estonian et, Turkish tr, Russian ru, Italian it (#594), German de (#574), Polish pl, Czech cs, Hungarian hu and French fr. 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 and Turkish 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-PL and pl_PL.UTF-8 system 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 in tl! 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: 12 — 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) and French (fr), 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. 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.

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)
2026-10-11	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
2026-10-11	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)
2026-10-11	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