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zone.tab</title></head><body>
<div>Thanks for your response. I now remember meeting someone from IBM
at an IMUG meeting at Apple; he described metazones.</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>What is the best way for me to stay informed of CLDR related to
time zones? And is there a way to make comments, suggestions or
discuss?</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>Chuck</div>
<div><br></div>
<div>At 1:54 PM -0700 7/10/07, Mark Davis wrote:</div>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>We have actually instituted an
alternative mechanism called 'metazones', which are somewhat like what
you describe. They basically coalesce zones that have the same
behavior in modern time. However, they have some further restrictions,
and we only put this in recently thus haven't gathered enough data to
be useful yet.<br>
<br>
Mark<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>On 7/10/07,<b> Chuck Soper</b> <<a
href="mailto:chucks2@veladg.com">chucks2@veladg.com</a>> wrote:<br>
<blockquote>I've been on the tz list for several years. I have tried
to follow the Time Zone Localizations topic for CLDR.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>I do not understand why translations would be supplied for
timezone IDs (tzIDs). Many tzIDs refer to the same time zone name. For
example, I believe that Argentina has 2 time zone names, yet it has 10
tzIDs to handle DST rules for various states. Does this mean that 20
localized names would be required for Argentina? Does this mean that a
new tzID would not be localized?</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>Looking at 381 tzIDs of a tzData version (from 2006), I
multiply it by two (for std and dst names) to obtain 762 time zone
names required. By removing names of tzIDs that do not recognize DST
and removing tzIDs that refer to the same time name (e.g. many tzIDs
refer to Central European Time), I was to reduce total time zone names
from 762 to 212.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>Can over 500 names can be removed from the translation
list? Multiplying 500 potentially unneeded names by the number of
translations would result in a large reduction of translation
efforts.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>My approach is dependent on having a stable list of time
zone names. As far as I know, such a list does not exist. If such a
list existed, I would envision tzIDs being mapped to the 'time zone
name' list.</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>Chuck</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
<blockquote>At 10:44 AM -0700 7/10/07, Mark Davis wrote:<br>
<blockquote type="cite" cite>The Unicode CLDR project (<a
href="http://unicode.org/cldr/">http://unicode.org/cldr/</a>) does
supply translations for timezone IDs. There are a few caveats.<br>
<blockquote>1. The timezone database
really has equivalence classes of IDs. One of these can be used as a
representative for any in the equivalence class. It is the zone.tab
file that contains such IDs. CLDR started by using that file, but
unfortunately it is not stable (different equivalent IDs can be
substituted at any time). So what we do is use as the representative
the one that historically the first one used in any zone.tab file
(after CLDR started).<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>2. We allow, but do not
encourage, translation of zones that are the only zone in a country.
For that we use the country name. This cuts down very substantially on
the number of translations needed. That is, you would see the
equivalent of "Italy", and "United States (Los
Angeles)" -- only in the latter case do we need translations for
the cities.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>3. Translators can
optionally add other variations: daylight (summer) time, standard
(winter) time, and generic time, both abbreviated and long.<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>4. These choices percolate
out to clients of CLDR: Google, IBM, Apple, Adobe, and many
others.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<blockquote>Mark<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>On 7/10/07,<b> Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]</b> <<a
href="mailto:olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov">olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov</a>>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote>I'm forwarding this message from Vincent Untz, who is not
on the time zone mailing list.<br>
<br>
Those of you who are on the time zone mailing list should direct
replies appropriately.<br>
<br>
<span
></span
> <span
></span
> --ado<br>
<br>
-----Original Message-----<br>
From: Vincent Untz [mailto:<a href="mailto:vuntz@gnome.org">
vuntz@gnome.org</a>]<br>
Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 1:24 PM<br>
To: <a
href="mailto:tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov">tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov</a><br
>
Subject: Localization of timezones from zone.tab<br>
<br>
Hi,<br>
<br>
[please keep me cc'ed since I'm not subscribed to this list]<br>
<br>
I know that, at least in GNOME, there are now three places where
we</blockquote>
<blockquote>parse zone.tab to get a list of timezones supported by the
OS. I suppose<br>
other projects are also doing this. This list is then presented to
the<br>
user to let him choose the timezone.<br>
<br>
The problem here is that we let the user choose strings which look
like<br>
"Antarctica/South_Pole". This is not really good for<br>
non-english-speaking people ;-)<br>
<br>
Of course, we can add all the timezones to our list of strings to<br>
translate, but this means all projects needing to do so will
duplicate<br>
this work and the translations.<br>
<br>
I'd like the tz database to ship translations in po files. This
would<br>
imply the following:<br>
<br>
+ create a small script to generate a POT file from zone.tab
(easy)<br>
+ submit the POT file to the translation project [1] (or any other<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote> place that helps with translation)<br>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>+ add the po files for translation to the tz database<br>
+ choose a gettext domain<br>
<br>
(Of course, I'm quite probably forgetting about a step :-))<br>
<br>
I've seen that this topic has been discussed before [2], but the<br>
proposition there was really more ambitious, so I'm hoping a
simple<br>
approach would be welcomed.<br>
<br>
What do you think?<br>
<br>
Thanks,<br>
<br>
[1] <a
href="http://translationproject.org/">http://translationproject.org/</a
><br>
[2] <a href="http://osdir.com/ml/time.tz/2004-09/msg00000.html">
http://osdir.com/ml/time.tz/2004-09/msg00000.html</a><br>
<br>
Vincent<br>
<br>
--<br>
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote><br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
Mark<br>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote><br></blockquote>
</blockquote>
<blockquote type="cite" cite><br>
<br>
<br>
--<br>
Mark</blockquote>
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