CLDR translates principal city names affiliated with timezones, and provides a mapping to Windows timezones. That is all.
(It doesn't define or translate timezone names, or allow for the grouping of historical timezones in to a reduced set of entitites suitable for presentation to end users.)
It actually does both - it defines an entity called a "metazone" that is for example "America_Eastern", provides mappings (both present _and_ historical) of all the various Olson zones that map to it (for example, America/New_York and America/Indianapolis), and each language file may contain translations for the name of it (for example, es.xml has an entry with <generic>Hora oriental</generic><standard>Hora estándar oriental</standard><daylight>Hora de verano oriental</daylight>). I don't know how you came to believe that it contained none of these things.
You are right. It seems I had somehow missed 'supplemental/metaZones.xml' within core.zip of the CLDR distribution which does indeed seem to do this. (i18n names live in 'common/main/<language>.xml' under timeZoneNames.) Thanks for taking the time to point this out, and I hope this thread is useful to people searching in future. - Walter