Celestia, translation and languages

Tosv · Post #1by **Tosv** » 11.03.2005, 21:05

Well, this is just a thought... Sort of...

As you probably know, Celestia is growing in popularity all around the world. One "problem", however, when coming to the program is that the GUI is English only (or, at least, it??s quite hard to localize). Several apps have solved this problem by giving every language a own languagefile or "languagepack". This way it??s easy to translate a program without any other apps then Windows notepad (if you??re running a win-op. sys.) and maybe some kind of converter to convert the file to the applications own format. Will this be possible for Celestia?

It would also (as I have seen somewhere else in this forum) be nice if Celestia could support national characters (as the nordic ?…, ?„, ?–). Right now it??s almost impossible to translate e.g. mr Hegwood??s excellent Tour-scripts because the lack of support of national characters.

Is this something that will be supported in future versions?

A third thought is to add a new forum, "Celestia Language & translations", to the already existing "Celestia Users", "Celestia Bugs", "Celestia Development" etc. In that forum we could talk about these things whithout having them "drowning" in all the other stuff.

Some dim thoughts in the late evening...

/ Tosv

Bob Hegwood · Post #2by **Bob Hegwood** » 11.03.2005, 21:55

Tosv,

Don't know if it will help or not, but Ulrich Dickmann (a.k.a. Adirondack)
has successfully translated a good number of scripts into German. Maybe
you could ask him for some advice on the processes involved?

Just a thought. Also, there are a wide variety of language translation sites
available on the web too. Seems to me that you could just copy and paste
the sections of the scripts that are giving you trouble.

Hope that helps.

Take care, Bob

Post #3by **Christophe** » 12.03.2005, 01:25

Well, thanks to Eugine's good work, I was finally able to add the missing piece to full i18n support to the KDE interface.

There still are a few quirks here and there, and an appropiate way to translate data files is still needed, but it's definitely getting better.

The translation page has been updated too.

Tosv · Post #4by **Tosv** » 12.03.2005, 12:54

Thanks a lot Bob Hegwood and Christophe for giving this info! I will look at it as soon as possible.

Unfortunately I do not have a linux-machine, the skills or even the time to do a GUI-translation on my own, but if some other Swede wants to start a translationteam i??m definitely interested on joining it. What I can do is translating the scripts, and maybe some other files where I can use the ordinary Windows notepad. But then I run into the problem with the non-supported national characters. I will mail mr Dickmann and see what he has to say about it.

Thanks again!

/ Tosv!

Jamstraz · Post #5by **Jamstraz** » 22.03.2005, 20:25

So am I allowed to change the fonts at all?

georgiouk · Post #6by **georgiouk** » 20.06.2005, 15:11

Hi
I am interested on translating Celestia so Greek students can use too.
I have translated the el.po but i don't know what to do next
Any ideas?

Thanks for your time
Georg

steffens · Post #7by **steffens** » 20.06.2005, 15:17

georgiouk wrote:Hi
I am interested on translating Celestia so Greek students can use too.
I have translated the el.po but i don't know what to do next
Any ideas?

In theory, all you had to do would be to mail your .po file to the mail address found on the "translation page" which is linked to in Christophe's post above.
In practice, this is what I did quite some time ago for the german translation, but I got no response and the translation status page is not updated either. I have not seen Christophe posting on this forum for a long time, maybe he is very busy with other tasks at the moment.

Hope that helps,
steffens

Post #8by **Christophe** » 20.06.2005, 21:12

I'm still there. Not very active though, the i18n patch still needs a few tweaks before it can be commited.

I can't seem to find any more recent version of the de.po file than the one currently on the i18n page. It's not necessary to send your catalog files right now though, the pot file will probably change before the i18n patch is finalized.

Tleilax · Post #9by **Tleilax** » 21.06.2005, 02:37

Ni Hao

I don't know what I can do. But I speak a little spanish, and now, I'm intensively learning Arabic, and a little Mandarin Chinese on the side. I have a friends who speak French, Italian, Portugese, and Vietnamese. While Arabic is very difficult to romanize, if Celestia can support Arabic script, I could translate it. Or if Celestia can support Romanized Chinese (with tone marks) I'll be able to translate that in about a year or two after I have a good hold on Arabic. I'm a little scetchy on the proccess of translating software, rather than just plain old writting. That i could definately do easily, for Spanish and Arabic. Translate tutorials, instructions, etc. Hope I can help.

Bamaani Allah
(Depending on how you Romanize the Alif "a", the consonant)

steffens · Post #10by **steffens** » 21.06.2005, 07:08

Christophe wrote:I can't seem to find any more recent version of the de.po file than the one currently on the i18n page. It's not necessary to send your catalog files right now though, the pot file will probably change before the i18n patch is finalized.

No problem, I can resend my file when the patch is ready.
A question though: how do I import the changes of the pot file to my latest de.po file? Right now, all I did was downloading the latest de.po, editing with KBabel and sending it to you again. Now my version is very much out of sync with the file on the i18n page. I really do not want to translate all these messages again...

steffens

Post #11by **Christophe** » 21.06.2005, 19:05

You can use msgmerge to merge your de.po with the latest version of celestia.pot.

Code: Select all

msgmerge de.po celestia.pot -o de.new.po

maxim · Post #12by **maxim** » 22.06.2005, 07:43

This translation project is Linux specific, isn't it. At least the kind and amount of text is different from the Windows version.

maxim

Post #13by **Christophe** » 22.06.2005, 18:49

Acutally no, the new i18n patch is cross-platform and has been reported to work on Windows. What still needs to be worked on for the Windows version is the translation of the widgets which can't be translated by gettext. The only solution I'm aware of to fix this is to provide a translated ressource file for each supported language.

maxim · Post #14by **maxim** » 23.06.2005, 10:12

I haven't seen support preparation in the window gui files yet. All text in there is still hard coded.

When I did my german translation of it, I also identified all hardcoded text and replaced it by #define constants. All #define constants were then declared in a seperate header file. Maybe that could help you in this issue. I must admit that I have no idea how I could support this in a way that compatibility is preserved.

I think it is ok to use different .recource files for different languages. Actually it was neccessary for my german translation to also alter the sizes and positions of boxes and buttons (defined in the .resource file) to get a proper display. This may be also neccessary for other languages.

Only thing I'm not shure, is how to control the languange setup. By an entry in celestia.cfg or somewhere else? BTW I wonder if we should make it able to allow users to define if they want settings to be saved in the registry or in a xml file?

maxim

Post #15by **Christophe** » 23.06.2005, 19:57

I haven't touched the windows specific files, put once the i18n framework is in place it's just a matter of marking the string constants with _(). For example "Some text" becomes _("Some text").

A make command then allows you to extract all the strings from all the source files and put them in a .pot file (which is a simple text file). Translators then use this file to produce .po files (also plain text, various utilities are available to facilitate this). At compilation time those string catalogs are compiled in a binary form and at run time, depending on environment variables the proper catalog is used to translate the strings. So the user can chose the language at run time with a simple environment variable which can also be set by Celestia from a setting stored in the registry. On Unix since all programs use this i18n system the env variables are already set.

maxim · Post #16by **maxim** » 24.06.2005, 14:37

Well, ok - as I already did some of this, it may help saving some work using the results here:
it's this!
and this!

If you think the style conventions I used are ok, just take and include it.

maxim

georgiouk · Post #17by **georgiouk** » 10.11.2005, 16:26

Hi!
I am trying to make a Greek version of the Windows Celestia so I have to do a lot of work on the GUI part.
Unfortunately when I replace the words in english with the ones in greek in my screenview not only they are not replaced but in the place of the words nothing appears.
And to be more specific : in src/celestia/celestiacore.cpp:3240 I replaced the word Distance with the greek one and the word vanished.

Any ideas?

Thanks for your time.

georgiouk · Post #18by **georgiouk** » 11.11.2005, 14:25

Maxim hello.
Is it easy for you to put in the forum and the other files you made the changes like the celestiacore.cpp. You would help me a lot

Thanks!