[all languages] Lower Prince's Quarter located in St Maarten (Dutch part)?

I’m going through a sailfish-components-timezone-qt5 and can’t figure out why on such a small island of St. Martin in Dutch part - St Maarten (Dutch part) there is a specific timezone for Lower Prince’s Quarter. It seems like an error, as clearly there should be capital - Philipsburg, Sint Maarten. Not to mention, that I could not find Philipsburg there as well.

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Because the time zone is called Ameria/Lower_Princes in the IANA Timezone database.

So I guess you wil have to take it up with IANA if you want to rename it to Philipsburg.

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Well, to be fair I do not like your reply and your tone. Your suggestion in this situation is irritating, as this is not about if I want it to be renamed!

I am not going through code, but only translating - apparently I was providing additional information that IANA is providing bad code. So, my suggestion is that you should take it to IANA, - as a maintainer of a code, that uses IANA data.

You are the one with the bad tone and unreasonable expectations. @nephros is not a Jolla employee or maintainer of timezones - and just stating facts.

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Excuse me, don’t escalate this. My only expectation is that I and others who post here should not be disrespected!

I found answer of @nephros very passive-aggressive even in English. My initial reason to post here, was because this looked like a bug, but it belonged to localisation. If this is a bug, then it should go to maintainer of Sailfish OS code - I for one don’t care what IANA is in this context.

Time for some ‘censoring’?
:roll_eyes:

–edit
oh, and to make this post somewhat dedicated to the topic:

But you should!

 

I never am sure about whether IANA is responsible or the ICANN?

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Hi.

I am very sure that @nephros did not mean any harm.

As far as i can figure out Lower Prince’s Quarter is the largest town.

If you look at Time in Australia - Wikipedia Australia, Canberra witch is the Australian capital, it does not get mentioned in the 18 zones for Australia.

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Listen, I posted here this information to help. This looked like a bug to me and I expected guidance if this is worth to deal with or there are other options to circumwent this. I was baffled about this Princess Quarter, as it is something to be baffled about as it stands out among others. My question was exactly about this - why Princess Quarter has timezone, as there was no information elsewhere why this town should have one. @nephros did not answer to that question, but posted as an answer exactly the same information what I posted. :man_shrugging:

If anyone wants to chat about nothing, just PM me and we will have a chat and laugh and maybe have some beer, but giving that type of answer is not serious.

This is localisation forum and I have no idea where that data has been sourced from. Translations are done through human British UK, that clearly differs from IANA data by default. My assumption is that any source can contain errors and there are ways to deal with them and contacting IANA to correct errors might not be a viable solution, as that might take unreasonably long time. Besides, if IANA does not have Boston, that does not mean, that it might prevent software from displaying what time is in Boston right now. :cowboy_hat_face:

Here:

Wikipedia has an explanation: tz database - Wikipedia

The names of large cities tend to be more permanent.[14] Usually the most populous city in a region is chosen to represent the entire time zone, although another city may be selected if it are more widely known, and another location, including a location other than a city, may be used if it results in a less ambiguous name.

Bold text = me.

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Well, neither am I, but I prefer direct answers.

I have no idea how Sailfish OS is using this timezone information(that is another task I need to do after this translation project), but so far my experience comes from this nifty tool, that lets me enter any location:

Well, this is all new information to me - including tz, but tz is not the only way to collect time zone information - it might be the only viable centralized open source, but it is up to Sailfish OS, how to adapt that information - it does not have to be 1:1 copy and it is not obliged to follow tz format. time.is is just one example how it is done right and when I was doing translation, I had couple of other language data open for comparision how it was done across different languages and for some places there were different translations used that were not even compatible (it is sometimes not easy to figure out how to translate terms from English, so that they sound natural) - instead of the one used for British UK placename, there was used different placename instead. IMO, if the consensus here is that Lower Prince’s Quarter naming as a timezone is tz related, then it is question why Sailfish has localization project of tz data(my initial thought was that that translation file sailfish_components_timezone_qt5.ts was deprecated data for older versions and I am wasting my time on this because Sailfish OS is using something else right now, but I have different thoughts now, that it is latest data) and there is no such standalone localization of tz itself? That is a very large file to comb through, but British UK also had some anomalies, but Lower Prince’s Quarter stood out - personally I am hearing about existence of this town for the first time and the biggest issue with localization of it was that there was not much information about it, but from your answer Philipsburg looks like a viable option for town to represent Sint Maarten timezone.

Wow that is what you come back to after the weekend. 0_o

@garaushi, no offense was meant or offered in my post above.

I feel you read things into it that I did not say - therefore if you took offense, that is unfortunate but it is then yours to keep and deal with, I see no need to apologize.

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You realize that on this homepage you can enter any city / location around the world and it tries to get the actual time there (depending on the region / state / country). This has nothing to do with timezone naming.
So you can enter also small towns and they will get recognized:

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No, it is not. Not until IANA changes the database Time Zone Database

This image should explain:

image

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No worries. I thought that this was brushed off, without the proper explanation and some of idioms of English might not carry very well on paper, as they are used in speech. If I had taken offence, I would have ended sentence with three exclamation marks and probably wrote the whole text with green, as that in my own opinion would make it distinctly clear that it is taken as an offence.

Anyway, Mondays are quite tense to me and it seems, that others who can’t sleep were also stirred up(and I should know my folks, grr), so I am also blaming me, that I did not foresee this and decided to post anything in night before Monday.

Well, this is already done, as IANA is not maintaining translations. Also, competition is always for the best :wink:

Exactly. That’s why I like it. And they have modified timezone naming to their own purpose and there is nothing that can prevent Sailfish OS to do the same - localizing timezones already is modifying naming by default.

No, they have not modified timezone naming, what makes you think that. They even give the name of the official timezone below the big clock:

The IANA time zone identifier for Sint Maarten is America/Guadeloupe.

The IANA time zone identifier for Groningen is Europe/Amsterdam.

The IANA time zone identifier for Hintertux is Europe/Vienna.

and so on …

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Only tz in provided link does not have Guadeloupe - it is Puerto Rico instead. But how it all actually refers to localizations, that nonEnglish(or apparently, because it is named Guadeloupe - even English) speaking people won’t use? For them this technical talk is complete nonsense. And I must remind, that my question was given in Localisation forum from a translator - me, because my main issue is not standard of time zones, but if people(because users - bots do not really need translations) will understand what is being translated to them and expected from them. For example, I must quite often converse with people who does not use English even as a technical language and they would request that information that is provided to them in human language - not some gibberish garbage, because this is not a concern of them how things operate and communicate among them on technical level, because they are of only importance to them - not the piece of equipment, that is least important thing in this. If I was considering this as a technical matter, I would have posted this somewhere else as a description of an issue, bug, etc.

We understand your reasoning of using L10n to make Sailfish OS more attractive with easily discoverable time zones, by ignoring engineering English and writing another (e.g. more known) city name instead for all languages.

However we do not have means to keep track of such changes, meaning once we pull IANA’s TZ DB updates, it might have renamed e.g. from “Lower Princes” to “Lower Prince’s”, our translations will get discarded by Pootle and due to inertia we would forget that now it has to be Philipsburg.

Also as well, if we set such precedent, we will deviate from IANA’s standards (which we agree might not be to everyone’s liking), then new users coming from other platforms to Sailfish OS would not know about such aspect, and would keep searching the time zone list in Settings for “Lower Prince”, not being able to find it. (Yes, actual number of SFOS users in St Maarten might not be very high, but if a precedent is set, this would spill out to other places on the map too).

Lastly, deciding which city should be named instead, wouldn’t be able to follow any strict rule. If a capital is always preferred, one must note that capitals also change (as happened in Kazakhstan in 1997).

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