Multi-timezone clock

Mark Davis mark.davis at jtcsv.com
Wed Jun 8 14:44:40 UTC 2005


If you just look at the cities, you will always find them to be sparse; that
is the intention. Our goal was to avoid having to translate all the city
names used in the tz database, since (a) it's a lot of data, and (b) their
usage is otherwise very limited, and (c) could be covered by the country
names. (This was discussed some time back on the list.) So the primary goal
is to translate the cities for cases where there are multiple zones in the
same country.

Thus for Russian, for example, we have cities for:
 ‎Australia/Adelaide =>  Аделаида (Австралия)
 ‎Australia/Brisban =>  Брисбен (Австралия)
...
But for single-zone countries like Austria, etc, we use just the country,
and don't have a translated city:
 ‎Europe/Vienna =>  Австрия
 ‎Europe/Mariehamn =>  Аландские острова
...
And if there is one 'main' city for the country, then we also just use the
country for that:
 ‎Europe/London =>  Великобритания
 ‎Europe/Belfast =>  Белфаст (Великобритания)

 ‎Europe/Madrid =>  Испания
 ‎Africa/Ceuta =>  Сеута (Испания)
 ‎Atlantic/Canary =>  Канарские о-ва (Испания)

http://www.unicode.org/cldr/data/dropbox/timezones/ru_timezones.html

(The translators have the freedom to use different format strings for the
city / country string, eg "<city> (<country>)" or "<country>, <city>" or
...)

We also don't translate where the translation doesn't differ from the last
field of the tzid. So if the name for the city is "New York" you won't see a
translation; just for cases like:  Efrog Newydd (cy), Nova Iorque (pt), Nowy
Jork (pl), Nueva York (es), Νέα Υόρκη (el), Нью-Йорк (ru), (uk), Ню Йорк
(bg), אמריקה/ניו-יורק (he), نيويورك (ar), ኒውዮርክ (am), นิวยอร์ก (th), 뉴욕
(ko), ニューヨーク (ja), 紐約 (zh_Hant), 纽约 (zh)....

That being said, this is still a work in progress. Our focus in the last
release was on getting the high-runner languages and zones. For example, if
you look at Greek
(http://www.unicode.org/cldr/data/dropbox/timezones/el_timezones.html),
you'll find
 ‎America/New_York => Νέα Υόρκη (Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες)
but
 ‎Antarctica/Casey  =>  Casey (Ανταρκτική)
so for the latter we have the country but not the city (the Greeks somehow
not being that interested in Antarctic timezones yet). And for a number of
the draft languages (eg  Azeri), we have little or no data yet.

‎Mark

----- Original Message ----- 
From: <peter.verthez at alcatel.be>
To: <tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov>
Sent: Tuesday, June 07, 2005 22:40
Subject: Multi-timezone clock


> Hello all,
>
> I've been making a multi-timezone clock based on the Olson
> timezone database, which may be interesting to the people on
> this mailing list.  The freshmeat project page can be found
> here:
> http://freshmeat.net/projects/intclock
>
> The tz database is used in the configuration window, to select
> a timezone for each clock.
>
> The program is written in Perl and requires perl-Gtk2 (actually,
> perl-Gtk will also work, but with a much less polished user
> interface).
>
> It is currently available in English, Dutch and German.  Country
> names are translated via the CLDR (currently version 1.3) for all
> languages automatically.  Manual translation is only needed for
> some 30 strings in the user interface.
>
> Note that the translations for timezone names in the CLDR (i.e.
> the exemplarCity entries) are currently not used, because the
> available data is too sparse: all city names are shown in English.
> If the CLDR includes more entries later, this may change.
>
> All suggestions, and translations to other languages, are very
> welcome (see web page for details).
>
> Best regards,
> Peter.
>
>
>
>
>





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