FW: Localization of timezones from zone.tab

Tue Jul 10 22:05:53 UTC 2007

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Mark

On 7/10/07, Chuck Soper <chucks2 at veladg.com> wrote:
>
>  Thanks for your response. I now remember meeting someone from IBM at an
> IMUG meeting at Apple; he described metazones.
>
> 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?
>
> Chuck
>
> At 1:54 PM -0700 7/10/07, Mark Davis wrote:
>
> 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.
>
> Mark
>
> On 7/10/07,* Chuck Soper* <chucks2 at veladg.com> wrote:
>
> I've been on the tz list for several years. I have tried to follow the
> Time Zone Localizations topic for CLDR.
>
>
> 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?
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> Chuck
>
>
>
> At 10:44 AM -0700 7/10/07, Mark Davis wrote:
>
> The Unicode CLDR project (http://unicode.org/cldr/) does supply
> translations for timezone IDs. There are a few caveats.
>
> 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).
>
> 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.
>
> 3.      Translators can optionally add other variations: daylight (summer)
> time, standard (winter) time, and generic time, both abbreviated and long.
>
> 4.      These choices percolate out to clients of CLDR: Google, IBM,
> Apple, Adobe, and many others.
>
>   Mark
>
> On 7/10/07,* Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E]* <olsona at dc37a.nci.nih.gov>
> wrote:
>
> I'm forwarding this message from Vincent Untz, who is not on the time zone
> mailing list.
>
> Those of you who are on the time zone mailing list should direct replies
> appropriately.
>
>                                 --ado
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vincent Untz [mailto: vuntz at gnome.org]
> Sent: Tuesday, July 10, 2007 1:24 PM
> To: tz at lecserver.nci.nih.gov
> Subject: Localization of timezones from zone.tab
>
> Hi,
>
> [please keep me cc'ed since I'm not subscribed to this list]
>
> I know that, at least in GNOME, there are now three places where we
>
> parse zone.tab to get a list of timezones supported by the OS. I suppose
> other projects are also doing this. This list is then presented to the
> user to let him choose the timezone.
>
> The problem here is that we let the user choose strings which look like
> "Antarctica/South_Pole". This is not really good for
> non-english-speaking people ;-)
>
> Of course, we can add all the timezones to our list of strings to
> translate, but this means all projects needing to do so will duplicate
> this work and the translations.
>
> I'd like the tz database to ship translations in po files. This would
> imply the following:
>
> + create a small script to generate a POT file from zone.tab (easy)
> + submit the POT file to the translation project [1] (or any other
>
>    place that helps with translation)
>
> + add the po files for translation to the tz database
> + choose a gettext domain
>
> (Of course, I'm quite probably forgetting about a step :-))
>
> I've seen that this topic has been discussed before [2], but the
> proposition there was really more ambitious, so I'm hoping a simple
> approach would be welcomed.
>
> What do you think?
>
> Thanks,
>
> [1] http://translationproject.org/
> [2] http://osdir.com/ml/time.tz/2004-09/msg00000.html
>
> Vincent
>
> --
> Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Mark
>
>
>

-- 
Mark
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