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, JustSystems, Microsoft,
Monotype Imaging, NetApp, Oracle, SAP, Sun Microsystems, Sybase, UC Berkeley,
Yahoo!, plus well over a hundred Associate, Liaison, and Individual
members.
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