24-hour or 12-our clock and %p

[Ask Hjorth Larsen <asklarsen gmail com>]

Hello

In many languages including Danish, "am" and "pm" ("%p" in strftime)
do not exist.  When using the 12-hour clock one would simply say e.g.
"11:32" which is of course ambiguous.  On a computer one would use the
24-hour clock to simply avoid this ambiguity.

However we still have to provide a translation for strings like "%l:%M
%p".  So what is the most correct translation?

 1) Force the user to use 24-hour clock by simply translating it to "%H:%M", or
 2) use the imprecise "%l:%M", or
 3) retain the alien "%l:%M %p"?

The user should probably not be using 12-hour clock in the first
place, and so we would presumably rely on the locale settings already
making it so that the correct code gets called.  I would therefore
guess that option 3) is better.  In some cases, though, the idea might
be that the translator chooses the format by means of the translation,
and so it would be completely pointless not to use the most natural,
24-hour string.  Are there any rules or specifications for this?

Best regards
Ask