FW: Indonesia time zones

Paul Eggert eggert at twinsun.com
Tue Feb 26 07:40:56 UTC 2002


> From: George Zeigler [mailto:genz1968 at mtu-net.ru]
> Sent: Thursday, February 21, 2002 9:51 PM
> 
>     I think the Indonesia time abbreviations need to be corrected.

As a rule, the database uses English abbreviations for time zone
names.  This is partly to avoid controversy, as often the inhabitants
of a region disagree (sometimes violently) about what the
abbreviations should be.  And it is partly due to limitations of the
software, which has a limited character set repertoire.  That is why
we use English abbreviations for Indonesia, and for (almost) all other
locations.  It is up to local software to translate the abbreviations;
this is currrently outside the scope of the tz database.

There is an exception for Moscow; for reasons of historical
compatibility with computer conventions that existed before the tz
database, Moscow time uses the abbreviations MSK and MSD, which are
neither English nor Russian Cyrillic (and which thus confuse both
English and Russian readers :-).  But I'd rather avoid future
exceptions like that.

> 1. WIB stand for Waktu Indonesia bagian Barat (Western Indonesian
> Subtime), 7 hours ahead of GMT

I think "Waktu Indonesia Barat" is a bit more common in actual use, at
least on the Web.  I've translated it as "Western Indonesia Time"
(WIT).  Similarly for the other Indonesian time zones.

I haven't seen an official translation for these time zone names.
However, <http://www.murmur.nl/kamus/browse2.php?letter=W> translates
it into Dutch as "West Indonesische tijd", which closely matches our
English translation.



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