On Oct 19, 2016, at 3:02 AM, John Haxby <john.haxby@oracle.com> wrote:
tzdb deals in timezones, it doesn't deal in localized timezone names. Localized timezone names come from CLDR (http://cldr.unicode.org/). So, for example, the date in Berlin right now is
Wed 19 Oct 11:13:56 CEST 2016
That's English abbreviations and an English timezone name because I'm English. If the timezone name was "MESZ" I would be somewhat confused. If I was German then I'd expect the time to be displayed as
Mi 19. Okt 11:13:56 MESZ 2016
Although, unfortunately: $ sw_vers ProductName: Mac OS X ProductVersion: 10.11.6 BuildVersion: 15G1004 $ LANG=de_DE.UTF-8 TZ=Europe/Berlin date Mi 19 Okt 2016 10:54:31 CEST even though the CLDR appears to have MESZ in common/main/de.xml; as I remember, Apple haven't modified the tzcode-derived *BSD code for handling time zones in the UNIX API, so the "date" command doesn't give you translated abbreviations - some of the Core Foundation or Cocoa frameworks might have APIs that will.
The timezone abbreviation isn't actually translated on Linux because glibc (which is responsible for the translation) doesn't localize timezone names.
As with Linux, so with macOS (*mutatis mutants*, as it doesn't use glibc), at least at the UNIX API level, and probably so with *BSD. I can't speak for Solaris, AIX, or HP-UX.