construction image The Unicode CLDR v40 Alpha is now available for testing. The alpha has already been integrated into the development version of ICU. We would especially appreciate feedback from non-ICU consumers of CLDR data. Feedback can be filed at CLDR Tickets.

Alpha means that the main data and charts are available for review, but the specification, JSON data, and other components are not yet ready for review. Some data may change if showstopper bugs are found. The planned schedule is:

• Sep 21 — Beta (data)
• Oct 06 — Beta2 (spec)
• Oct 27 — Release

In CLDR v40, the main focus is on:

• Grammatical features (gender and case) for units of measurement in additional locales
  
  Phase 1 (v39) of grammatical features included just 12 locales (da, de, es, fr, hi, it, nl, no, pl, pt, ru, sv).
  
  Phase 2 (v40) has expanded the number of locales by 29 (am, ar, bn, ca, cs, el, fi, gu, he, hr, hu, hy, is, kn, lt, lv, ml, mr, nb, pa, ro, si, sk, sl, sr, ta, te, uk, ur), but for a narrower set of units.
  
  
• Emoji v14 names and search keywords
• Modernized Survey Tool front end.

There are many other changes: to find out more, see the draft CLDR v40 release page, which has information on accessing the date, reviewing charts of the changes, and necessary migration changes.

Unicode CLDR provides key building blocks for software supporting the world’s languages. CLDR data is used by all major software systems (including all mobile phones) for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages.

---

CLDR 27 Coverage Unicode CLDR 27 has been released, providing an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. This data is used by all major software systems for their software internationalization and localization, adapting software to the conventions of different languages for such common software tasks.

There was no Survey Tool data collection phase for CLDR 27. Instead, the release focused primarily on stability—cleaning up data inheritance and making specific fixes—as well as improvements to the JSON format of the data. Changes include the following:

• Cleanup of region locales: A major cleanup effort was undertaken to resolve gratuitous differences between region-specific locales and the parent from which they inherit. In regional locales, it was determined where the parent value was an acceptable replacement for a child-specific value which could then be removed, providing greater consistency in behavior in the various region locales. A special effort was made to clean up country names in certain locales.
• Changes to English inheritance: As an outcome of the cleanup effort above, the inheritance model for English locales is now simplified, making all en_XX locales inherit from either “en” directly ( for current or former U.S. territories ), or from British-influenced “en_001 - World English”. This is also reflected in some changes for measurement systems.
• Emoji: Data for emoji annotations and an emoji collation were added, to accompany Unicode Technical Report #51, Unicode Emoji.
• Collation: There are new sort orders for emoji (as noted above), and an Austrian phonebook sort order. Scripts can be reordered individually, rather than only in specific groups. Fractional tertiary weights are now used that are lower than common, to allow shorter sort-keys with normal Hiragana letters.
• Specification: The LDML specification has descriptions of new or modified structure, plus a number of fixes and clarifications. See Modifications for a list of changes.
• Improved documentation of locale inheritance and matching, bundle versus item lookup, and parent locale information.
• Extensive clarifications to the intended use of the language matching data.
• Explicit new definitions of Unicode identifiers, such as Unicode Calendar Identifier, for use in citations.
• Charts: The navigation within charts has been improved, and new ones added:
• Delta charts, showing detailed changes from v26 to v27.
• Day periods, showing the new day period selectors.
• Emoji Annotations, showing provisional annotations in English and 21 other locales.
• Territory Information, split out of Language Territory Information for easier viewing.
  
• JSON on github: The JSON form of the data is now available on github, rather than being found through the Data link.

Details are provided in http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-27, along with a detailed Migration section.

CLDR 26 Coverage Unicode CLDR 26 has been released, providing an update to the key building blocks for software supporting the world's languages. 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. This release focused primarily on Unicode 7.0 compatibility, Survey Tool improvements, increased coverage, new units, and improvements to collation and RBNF. Changes include the following:

• Data Growth: Major increase in the number of translations, with 77 locales now reaching the 100% modern coverage level, and an overall growth of about 20% in data.
• Units: Added 72 new units, added display names for all units and a new perUnitPattern (eg, liters per second).
• Collation: Updated collation (sorting) to Unicode 7.0, moved Unihan radical-stroke collation into root to avoid duplication, used import to reduce source size by 23% and ease maintenance. Major changes to Arabic collation.
• Spell-out numbers: improvements for round-trip fidelity; new syntax for use of plural categories.
• Specification: documented new structure, \x{h...h} syntax for Unicode code points; construction of “unit per unit” formats; clarified BCP47 and Unicode identifiers, and different kinds of locale lookup, matching, and inheritance.
• Survey Tool: Major improvements to the UI to make it easier and faster to enter and check data.

Details are provided in http://cldr.unicode.org/index/downloads/cldr-26, along with a detailed Migration section.

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee is pleased to announce the opening of the CLDR Survey Tool for data submission for Version 26 of CLDR, on May 13, 2014. We plan to allow data submission until June 19, and vetting of the submitted data until July 3. Version 26 is scheduled to be released in September 2014.

CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, and is used by much of the world’s software. Highlights for the CLDR 26 release are:

• Microsoft has joined the CLDR project as a major contributing partner.
• The survey tool user interface has undergone a major overhaul, thanks to the hard work of our friends at Apple.
• Google and IBM have focused on performance of the software, and we’ve also upgraded our hardware.
• New types of fields and structure are added, including many additional types of units.
• The new characters in the Unicode encoding standard (Version 7.0, due for release in July, 2014) are supported.

The CLDR survey tool can be reached by going to http://st.unicode.org/cldr-apps/survey. To view known issues with the tool, see the Known Issues page at http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/known-bugs. For example, we are still putting some finishing touches on some of the survey tool documentation.

Anyone is welcome to try out the tool, although only those with accounts will be able to make changes. To get an account, or if you have forgotten your login ID or password, please contact your CLDR TC representative. If you don't belong to a Unicode member organization, and are a native speaker of a language other than American English, you can obtain a guest account.

Any bugs with the tool can be reported to the CLDR committee by opening a New CLDR Ticket at http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/newticket

Thanks in advance for your participation in the Unicode CLDR project!

The Unicode CLDR Technical Committee is pleased to announce the opening of the CLDR Survey Tool for beta testing for Version 26 of CLDR, on May 1, 2014. CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages.

The beta test will give CLDR contributors a chance to try out the new features of the tool, without having to worry about the potential impacts on CLDR itself. If all seems to be going well during the beta test period, we plan to open the survey tool for "official" data submission on or about Thursday, May 8.

We plan to allow data submission until June 19, and data vetting until July 3. Version 26 is scheduled to be released in September 2014.

Highlights for the CLDR 26 release:

• Microsoft has agreed to join the CLDR project as a major contributing partner.
• The survey tool user interface has undergone a major overhaul, thanks to the hard work of our friends at Apple. Hopefully, users will find the interface more intuitive and easier to navigate.
• Google and IBM have also contributed significantly, especially in the area of improving performance. We have also upgraded our hardware, so we are hoping for less down-time and fewer interruptions to your work.
• New types of fields and structure, including many additional types of units. See new features in Version 26​.
• The first version to support the new characters in the Unicode encoding standard, Version 7.0, due for release in July, 2014.

The CLDR survey tool can be reached by going to http://st.unicode.org/cldr/apps/survey.

For known issues in the beta version, see Known Issues.

Anyone is welcome to try out the tool, although only those with accounts will be able to make changes. To get an account, or if you have forgotten your login ID or password, please contact your CLDR TC representative.

If you don't belong to a Unicode member organization, and are a native speaker of a language other than American English, you can obtain a guest account.

Any bugs with the tool can be reported to the CLDR committee by opening a new ticket at http://unicode.org/cldr/trac/newticket

Thanks in advance for your participation in the Unicode CLDR project!

May 1, 2013 — The Unicode CLDR 24 Survey Tool is open for data submission starting today. CLDR provides key building blocks for software to support the world's languages, with the largest and most extensive standard repository of locale data available. The survey tool is an online tool used by organizations and individuals to contribute data to this repository, and to vote on alternative contributions. For a complete description of the new enhancements and features in the CLDR survey tool, please see http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/whats-new

If you do not have a CLDR survey tool account and would like information on how you or your organization can contribute data to the CLDR project, please see http://cldr.unicode.org/index/survey-tool/accounts

Atom