Multilingual, multi-wavelength sky

One of the projects I've been working on in my spare time for the past few years is Chromoscope. It originated in an idea I had with Rob Simpson (Zooniverse fame) and Chris North (Sky at Night fame) to let people see how the sky varies across the electromagnetic spectrum. Even as we launched Chromoscope at .Astronomy in 2009, we realised that we should make it available in languages other than English.

As of today, Chromoscope is available in 12 languages: English, Cymraeg (Welsh), Deutsch (German), Español (Spanish), Français (French), Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic), עברית (Hebrew), Italiano (Italian), Polski (Polish), Português (Portuguese), svenska (Swedish), and Türkçe (Turkish). Another two languages - Danish and Hindi - are partly translated. These translations are due to a bunch of really nice volunteers. Thanks Huw Waters, Janine van Eymeren, Marie O'Sullivan, Tom Kerss, Lizette Guzman Ramirez, Dave Jones, Bruno Maffei, Evan Keane, Avi Shporer, Esti Sidley, Amruta Mehta, Pradeep Mohandas, Mike, Lech Mankiewicz, Ana Cabral, Robert Cumming and Arif Solmaz.



In the early days, the translation process was quite involved as the language had to be broken down and non-Latin characters had to be specially encoded. In the past couple of weeks I've been working on the first right-to-left/non-Latin-character language with Avi and Esti - Hebrew - so I decided it was about time I made it easier for both the translators and myself. I created a translation page that lets people work in their native script and then creates the appropriate encoded output that I need. I'm pretty happy with it as it has definitely made it much easier than it used to be.

Over the past year we've also been fortunate to gain improved gamma-ray and new near-infrared views of the sky too thanks to the Fermi and WISE teams.

Please let me know if you speak any languages that are not already translated and would like to make a translation. Once again, diolch, merci, grazie, danke, dziekuje, and thanks to all those volunteers who've helped so far.

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Posted in astro blog by Stuart on Friday 11th May 2012 (20:36 BST) | 1 Comment | Permalink

Comments: Multilingual, multi-wavelength sky

you can add this link to my name: http://www.facebook.com/arif19

thanks for the post. cheers.

Posted by Arif Solmaz on Friday 18th May 2012 (20:51 UTC)

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