I'll post this to the list, in case others are curious.

From http://unicode.org/cldr/ you can find out about the membership and participation. Anyone can file a bug against the database. See Filing Bug Reports on that page.

‎Mark ----- Original Message ----- From: "walter harms" <wharms@bfs.de> To: "Mark Davis" <mark.davis@jtcsv.com> Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 09:07 Subject: Re: Corrections to timezone database

I mark, who collects remarks about the translation ?

I have some Problems since the 'official Name' and the common name differ: e.g.: belarus/weisrussland (even the pages:

http://www.auswaertiges-amt.de/www/de/laenderinfos/laender/laender_ausgabe_h...

mix these)

Côte d’Ivoire: Elfenbeinküste Suriname: -> sometimes: Surinam

re, walter

Mark Davis wrote:

...

I do want to call people's attention to the CLDR project work on timezone identifiers (http://unicode.org/cldr/).

We are in the process of gathering localization data for this coming release. We have gathered some data for the locales {locale identifiers: ar cs da de en es fi fr hu it ja nb nl pl pt pt_PT ru sv tr zh zh_Hant}, and are working on fleshing those out and adding more (we're not done yet!). See http://unicode.org/cldr/data/dropbox/timezones/.

For example, the following shows the current translations using the data we have (for German):

http://unicode.org/cldr/data/dropbox/timezones/de_current.html

And the following shows a checklist for translators (note: in many cases those don't *need* translation, since they are the same as the default names.)

http://unicode.org/cldr/data/dropbox/timezones/de_to_localize.xml

=====

The mechanism we use for the generic (wall time) tzid is:

If a country has a single zone, we use the country name. Example (from Chinese simplified):

Europe/Brussels => 比利时

Otherwise we use the last field of the TZID, followed by the country name in parens. Example:

Australia/Melbourne => 墨尔本 (澳大利亚)

We are going to be adding additional information where one zones in *certain* multi-zone countries will just use the country name. Example, we have currently:

Asia/Shanghai => 上海 (中国) Asia/Kashgar => 喀什葛尔 (中国)

Once we have that data, we'll generate:

Asia/Shanghai => 中国 Asia/Kashgar => 喀什葛尔 (中国)

(All of this can be overridden by specific localizations for generic, standard, or daylight names. So if the equivalent of "Beijing Time" is what is customary in Chinese, we could use that.)

‎Mark

----- Original Message ----- From: "Paul Eggert" <eggert@CS.UCLA.EDU> To: "Funda Wang" <fundawang@gmail.com> Cc: "Tz (tz@elsie.nci.nih.gov)" <tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov> Sent: Friday, February 04, 2005 00:08 Subject: Re: Corrections to timezone database

...

Funda Wang <fundawang@gmail.com> writes:

...

In fact, we do not have an official abbreviation for "The Time of Beijing", as we do not use English :)

OK, in that case we should probably stick with "CST", as it abbreviates the most commonly used English phrase for the time in China.

The tz database is an English database, by and large. For example, it uses the abbreviation "CET" for Central European Time even though most residents of Central Europe use other abbrevations like "MEZ". We don't currently have the resources to localize all the abbreviations, so we stick with English ones. If and when the database is localized, we will transliterate "CST" in China to the appropriate Chinese characters (e.g., the characters for "The Time of Beijing").

...

the main reason that there should be a "Beijing" is that we call UTC+8 as "The Time of Beijing".

There is longstanding precedent in the tz database for decoupling tz zone labels from informal time zone names. For example, the tz label "Europe/London" denotes local time in England, even though the people in England call their local time "Greenwich Mean Time". The case of Beijing is somewhat similar.