Celestia Forums

In septembre, 51000 high school students from the [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auvergne_(r?©gion)]Auvergne r?©gion[/url] will get a two CD pack containing free software including Celestia. (ZDNet article in French).

Other r?©gions including [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/??le-de-France_(r?©gion)]??le-de-France[/url] (that's over half a million students by itself) are said to be interested as well. And the project will also likely be extended to pre- and post-high school students.

Of course that doesn't mean that all of those students will sudenly start using Celestia but it certainly is an indication that usage of Celestia in the class room will become large scale in the coming years in France.

I guess that's just another reason for someone to get gettext working with the Windows version!

Hi Christophe;

It is great news that Celestia will be included on a CD in France to go to high school students.

That will also happen here in America (sort of), beginning in a few months. I have been invited by an Astronomy Educator's catalog company in America to offer my Celestia Educational Activities to teachers across America. The company reportedly has a good circulation to high schools and colleges in the U.S. My Educational Activities are extensive (over 350 pages of written Astronomy text), cover 12 separate journeys through Celestia space that take over 35 hours to complete (if you take them all), and incorporate over 1.5 GB of add-ons, plus Celestia itself of course. As a result, I will be packaging them on a 2 CD set for use with Windows, MAC and Linux.

Things should be ready by October. It has been a MAJOR project to get it ready, taking up most of my summer. Its a good thing I'm a teacher myself and have off for the summer. I don't know how many teachers will purchase the CD but I hope it will reach at least a few thousand students.

I'm very curious to know what your last sentence in your post meant? What is meant by

I guess that's just another reason for someone to get gettext working with the Windows version

Does the French version have some kind of scrolling text in it? I use MS Word documents with embedded cel"urls in it. Students read about the topic, then click a cel"url link to go there in Celestia. they get to fly the spaceship, explore on their own, etc. It does, however, require that they hop from written document to Celestia, then back again, then back again, etc. It would be wonderful if the entire Astronomy lesson appeared directly on the Celestia screen, but putting it all into a giant script would not be practical. In addition, students need to be able to go back and re-read something. Scripts don't allow that. So ... what text feature is your quote referencing???

Thanks in advance.


Frank

well you know what this means ---the forum will get even more bisuy( i can never spell that word)
we may nead to set up more forums

fsgregs wrote:Things should be ready by October. It has been a MAJOR project to get it ready, taking up most of my summer. Its a good thing I'm a teacher myself and have off for the summer. I don't know how many teachers will purchase the CD but I hope it will reach at least a few thousand students.

That sounds great, I hope your work will be picked up by a large number of schools.

fsgregs wrote:I'm very curious to know what your last sentence in your post meant? What is meant by

I guess that's just another reason for someone to get gettext working with the Windows version

Nop, sorry, this is not what you think it is. Gettext is a set of tools used for internationalisation. As you know Celestia has already been translated to French and other languages but only on Unix. These translations could be used for Windows aswell, all that is needed is that someone get the Windows version to build with gettext.

Christophe wrote:Gettext is a set of tools used for internationalisation. As you know Celestia has already been translated to French and other languages but only on Unix. These translations could be used for Windows aswell, all that is needed is that someone get the Windows version to build with gettext.

Does gettext also provide localizations for Celestia's GUI? (menus, dialog boxes)

dirkpitt wrote:

Christophe wrote:Does gettext also provide localizations for Celestia's GUI? (menus, dialog boxes)

It does for the various Unix GUI, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way to use it for resource files which is what the Windows GUI uses currently.

There are several solutions:
- Add translated versions of the resource files, that's what they are for after all. The drawback is that it means duplicating translation work since some strings already appear in the catalog files used by gettext. We'd basically be using two i18n systems side by side: gettext and resource files.
- Drop resource files entirely and build the GUI 'by hand' directly using the MFC, that would allow using gettext. I don't know how difficult that would be, but that's probably a lot of work.
- Keep the resource files but once the window/dialog is created replace all strings by their gettext translation. I'm not sure that's feasible and that would be an ugly hack.
- Drop the current MFC GUI altogether and create a new one using a saner toolkit: wxWidgets, GTK, Qt 4...

Salut Christophe,

Take a look at this place

http://celestia.myftp.org/forum/index.php?s=6c30de2d69b7999dc10b3423716607b0&showforum=5

Jdou

Yes, I am aware that there exist translated versions of Celestia for Windows in several languages including French.

But this is a work that has to be redone for each new version of Celestia, it can't be shared between languages (one separate source tree and binary is required for each language) nor between platforms (Windows only).

Moreover, usualy those translated versions break scripts, cel urls and possibly add-ons since body names are directly translated in the core data files. Gettext-enabled versions always use English names internaly, you get translated body names in the interface and nothing breaks. Adding a new language is as simple as translating a list of strings provided in a single file, no tweaking required.

Of course this is better than nothing and I applaud to the effort, but it's not the preferred nor optimal solution to get Celestia in several languages.

I agree with you.
So I didn't translate body names. I just translated the ressources and some unimportant messages.

About to redone translation for each new version, I have to say I am not too busy with that


Jdou

jdou wrote:About to redone translation for each new version, I have to say I am not too busy with that

Ouch, ok, ok, not my fault.

By the way I'd be interested in comparing your translation of Celestia's terminology (Follow, Track, etc) with mine. I must confess I didn't put too much care nor spent much time on this, I just wanted to put something out that worked - I'm no professional translator

Could you send me the translated resource files?

This is great news !

I'm currently working on a quite big project about the lenght of the day along the seasons. I'm making a DVD + CDRom pack that will be used by pupils from 8. The project is quite finished, and we're going to form an academic group of research here in Nancy to finalize it. Like all other Celestia contributors, I'm working very hard on it ( < this is my wife's smile at the moment) cause I want it to be freely distributed in any school that will ask for it (the pack, not my wife's smile... ).

As Jdou did (Merci encore !), I made my own french interface by changing the menu of the Celestia.exe file. That implies to make these changes on every updated version.

For Windows users, would it be possible to make Celestia compatible with the use of executable .exe patches (for any languages) that would translate the menu interface. This is already done in many programs... Just an idea...