Isn't it the exact same as what your character would do?
Note that the animation itself has nothing to do with "moving" in the game world. What's important is that the engine synchronizes translation of the model and playing of the animation so it looks as if the "walk" animation moved the character forward.
The animation must contain meta-data that tells the engine how much translation/velocity changes are produced or this must be hard-coded in the engine for specifically named animations and all animators must match their animations to the translations the engine will produce.