Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Unicode Releases Common Locale Data Repository, Version 2.0

Mountain View, CA, May 25, 2011 - The Unicode® Consortium announced today the release of a new version of the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (Unicode CLDR 2.0), providing key building blocks for software to support the world's languages. The main features of CLDR 2.0 are improved data for top 55 languages, with an increase of over 45% in data fields. The details are found in the CLDR 2.0 Release Note (http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-2-0).

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. Unicode CLDR 2.0 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.

For web pages with different views of CLDR data, see http://cldr.unicode.org/index/charts. For more information about the Unicode CLDR project (including charts) see http://cldr.unicode.org/.