1. A computer-implemented method for translating a first shader in a first shading language to a second shader in a second shading language, comprising: identifying string occurrences in a first shader in a first shading language, where each occurrence is a literal string or a non-literal string value; mapping each string occurrence to a non-string representation and storing each representation in a memory for access by a second shader during execution of the second shader, where identical string values are mapped to identical non-string representations; translating the first shader to a distinct second shading language to create the second shader where each string occurrence is translated to an access to the memory for the string occurrence's respective non-string representation; generating one or more images at least in part using the second shader.