Language localisation plugin for After effects

[kritikar13970746]

Hi,

I am working on a project for one of my clients to create/ identify automated plugin/tool for Adobe After effect language localization ie. to convert the content in Adobe After effects to different languages.

Could someone point in the right direction as to where I find an automated plugin for the same?

If not,  just a sample plugin to get started with the project?

Any help would be massively appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Kritika!

[Guest]

Mmmh, not really sure I understood what you wanted to do?

Do you want to translate an already existing After Effects (binary) plugin or even parts of the AE UI itself?

Or do you want to translate our own plugin for which you have the sources?

[kritikar13970746]

What I meant is that a plugin which could translate the texts within the After effects canvas and not the UI of the AE.

[Guest]

Ah, ok, now I understand better.

Well, you can get/set the content of a text layer using either the C++ SDK or scripting, as far as I know.

Then it is simply a task of getting that string translated into your target language, which is a task independent on AE or the plugin architecture. A simple approach would be to do an internet request to an online translator like Google Translate, parse the result and write that back to the layer content.

[kritikar13970746]

Thanks, Toby for that information.

There are two scenarios of translation :

1. When the content is already translated by the third party -

In this case, we just need to copy & paste the content from the word document. But is there a way to automate this process of copy & paste from word to After Effects?

2. When we need to translate the content on our own -

Your response fits this case perfectly but is there a chance to get away from google translator because the G- translate is not quite viable and we still need someone to proofread the content if you know what I mean.

[Guest]

Then you need to find a working pipeline for our custom process

The Google Translate was just a simple example, and of course not commercially viable.

An option could for example be to export the contents of all the AE text layers into one separate text file (txt, csv, Excel, whatever), and then let a human or a software translate that, e.g. by adding a translated text as the second column for each line. Then you could automatically import this text file again and reassign all text layer values that have the second column set with the translation.

Just an idea.

This does (except the accessing of the text layers using the AE API) however not have much to do with a plugin or AE itself, but is more a general issue to come up with a scripting or programming solution that fits your custom translation workflow.

[kritikar13970746]

Yeah, that's right. Is it possible to achieve this to streamline the translation workflow?

I know except the part where we access the text layer content this wouldn't involve any kinda plugin as such but yeah a script running on top of AE would be the solution to this.

The only overhead on this will be to manually tweak the texts to fit into the text boxes on the canvas as the length of the translated texts varies depending upon the type of language (for eg: Welsh which tends to be lengthy).

[Dataclay5FFB]

No matter what external translation solution you pick, Dataclay's Templater extension for AE can be integrated to perform dynamic text, image, audio, and video replacement along with batch rendering. It is extremely popular for localization use cases.