From: Andy McDonald Date: Sat, 26 May 2007 14:16:59 -0400 Subject: Re: zone.tab corrections
In the case that Russian is one of the official languages, I would agree that no change is required. However this is distinct from the status of Russian as being widely understood; certainly many people in the former USSR understand Russian, but I would imagine that the average Ukrainian, Moldovan, Tajik or Georgian would take issue with a transliteration from Russian.
Note that I am a bit lazy (I did most of the Russian names for TZ). Lists with time zones in Russia and the former Soviet Republics can be found in Russian. Finding the local names means a lot more work. The GeoNames server is a great help though. But the transliteration of names is not always correct. Best would be: find the name in the original spelling with Cyrillic, Arabic, whatever characters, find the official or a reliable transliteration scheme and produce a posix 1 conformant transliteration. There you see: too much work for me!