RE: what does "internationalized" mean?

From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Wed Jun 20 2007 - 04:09:46 CDT

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    Isn’t what the « territory » localization data in CLDR is already trying to
    do?

    Note however that ISO 3166 country names are sometimes formal long names
    (they are currently agreed only in English and French but it is not as
    simple as it would seem, for political reasons).

    The CLDR has another focus: trying to focus (for now) a consensus about the
    most common names.

    The CLDR for now contains no additional entries for long formal names or
    territories…

     

    And also does not translate all ISO 3166 reserved codes that are
    exceptionally assigned or reserved (with a name only in English), and
    contains data about regions that are not encoded in ISO 3166 but in UN
    statistics, plus historical data (that have been removed from ISO 3166-1 and
    moved to ISO 3166-3 under a different code).

     

    These differences are still not very critical. The main problem is to find
    an agreement about country names in every language with enough source
    references, and keeping the current objectives of ISO 3166 to publish only
    the “politically correct” country names for use in International
    organizations.

     

    Finally, ISO 3166 currently publishes names using only capital letters. This
    is effectively a localization problem because it does not respect the normal
    orthography even in English and French only… So I just think that ISO 3166
    should be used only as a reference for the assignment of codes to non
    ambiguous modern countries, nothing more. The published ISO 3166 names are
    not intented to be locally correct, and a localization of these published
    names is still necessary, even in English and French, but the initial
    objectives of ISO 3166-1 should be kept.

     

    The best that ISO 3166 can do is to produce an authoritative mapping of
    unambiguous countries and their codes, not the list of effective country
    names that are part of a localization project that should remain an
    informative (non mandatory) external reference. So why ISO isn’t seeking to
    help improving the existing localization projects like the CLDR, looking for
    possible issues or missing data that the CLDR could add in some future (for
    example the long formal names)?

     

      _____

    De : unicode-bounce@unicode.org [mailto:unicode-bounce@unicode.org] De la
    part de JFC Morfin
    Envoyé : mardi 19 juin 2007 14:28
    À : Unicode Mailing List
    Objet : what does "internationalized" mean?

     

    I was recently invited in an ad-hoc ISO meeting over a proposed NWIP
    concerning an internationalized version of the Country Codes (the most used
    standard).



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