From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Wed Jul 02 2008 - 11:16:04 CDT
Unicode Releases Common Locale Data Repository, Version 1.6
Mountain View, CA, July 2, 2008 The Unicode Consortium announced today the
release of the new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository
(Unicode CLDR 1.6), providing key building blocks for software to support
the world's languages. Unicode CLDR is by far the largest and most
extensive standard repository of locale data. This data is used by a wide
spectrum of companies for their software internationalization and
localization: adapting software to the conventions of different languages
for such common software tasks as formatting of dates, times, time zones,
numbers, and currency values; sorting text; choosing languages or countries
by name; transliterating different alphabets; and many others.
CLDR 1.6 contains data for 137 languages and 140 territories: 374 locales
in all. Version 1.6 of the repository contains over 32% more locale data
than the previous release, with nearly 24,000 new or modified data items
entered by over 220 different contributors.
Major contributors to CLDR 1.6 include Adobe, Apple, Google, IBM, and Sun,
plus official representatives from a number of countries. Many other
organizations and volunteers around the globe, including Gnome, Kotoistus,
LISA, OpenOffice, and Utilika, have also made important contributions. The
data for CLDR is gathered through the CLDR survey tool, which allows
organizations and volunteers to contribute, compare, and vet locale data.
For web pages with different views of CLDR data, see
http://unicode.org/cldr/charts.html.
Unicode CLDR 1.6 is part of the Unicode locale data project, together with
the Unicode Locale Data Markup Language (LDML:
http://unicode.org/reports/tr35/). LDML is an XML format used for general
interchange of locale data, such as in Microsoft's .NET. Major new features
of Unicode LDML 1.6 include:
* Plural rules (such as the 4 forms for Russian).
* Plural forms of currencies and date/time durations ("1 hour" vs "2 hours")
* Interval formats for a concise representation of a range of two
dates or times ("Jan 10-12, 2008").
* Telephone codes for different countries.
* Clarified fallback process for resource bundle lookup and resource
item lookup.
* Explicit definition of Unicode locale and language identifiers.
* Many other clarifications and corrections.
For more information about the Unicode CLDR project (including charts) see
http://unicode.org/cldr/. The latest features of CLDR will also be
showcased at the 32st Internationalization and Unicode Conference (IUC) on
September 8-10, 2008 in San Jose, CA -- see http://unicodeconference.org/.
About the Unicode Consortium
The Unicode Consortium is a non-profit organization founded to develop,
extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard and related globalization
standards. The membership of the consortium represents a broad spectrum of
corporations and organizations in the computer and information processing
industry: Adobe Systems, Apple, Basis Technology, Denic eG, Google,
Government of India, Government of Pakistan, Government of Tamil Nadu, HP,
IBM, Justsystem, Microsoft, Monotype Imaging, Oracle, SAP, Sun
Microsystems, Sybase, UC Berkeley, Yahoo!, plus well over a hundred
Associate, Liaison, and Individual members.
For more information, please contact the Unicode Consortium
(http://unicode.org/).
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