The Unicode Consortium announced that it will be hosting the Common Locale Data Repository project to support the world’s languages. To support users in different languages, programs must not only use translated text, but must also be adapted to local conventions. These conventions differ by language or region and include the formatting of numbers, dates, times, and currency values, as well as support for differences in measurement units or text sorting order. Most operating systems and many application programs currently maintain their own repositories of locale data to support these conventions. But such data are often incomplete, idiosyncratic, or gratuitously different from program to program. The Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) provides a general XML format for the exchange of locale information for use in application and system software development, combined with a public repository for a common set of locale data generated in that format. The Common Locale Data Repository was initially developed under the sponsorship of the Linux Application Development Environment (aka LADE) Workgroup of the Free Standards Group’s OpenI18N team, with a 1.0 version released in January 2004. The founding members of the workgroup were IBM, Sun, and OpenOffice.org, later joined by Apple Computer. CLDR will be managed by a dedicated technical committee of the Unicode Consortium. CLDR version 1.1 is expected in mid-May 2004, and a beta 1.1 version is available now. www.unicode.org