What it is
A date on a page carries four decisions: the order of day, month and year, whether the month is a numeral or a name, what stands between the parts, and whether a single-digit day or month is padded. A time carries two more, the twelve-hour or twenty-four-hour reckoning and the mark between hours and minutes. None of them is recoverable from the date itself.
The separators in use are few and each is ambiguous on its own: the solidus, U+002F, the full stop, U+002E, and the hyphen-minus, U+002D, between the parts of a date, and the colon, U+003A, or the full stop inside a time. A purely numeric date is therefore the one notation in this family that can be read as a different date rather than as a badly written one.
The wording that introduces a reference belongs to the phraseology section, and gazette-and-act-citation owns the shape of the reference itself. This record owns the notation of the date inside it.
Where the expectation comes from
The expectation was tested against a Codified reading and does not survive it. Nothing opened for this record binds a language community the way an orthography code does.
- ISO 8601 prescribes the order year, month, day, hour, minutes, seconds, and is currently ISO 8601-1:2019 and ISO 8601-2:2019. Its purpose, in the organization's own description, is that numeric dates "can be interpreted in different ways", and it "can be used by anyone who wants to use a standardized way" of presenting them. An instrument that offers itself to whoever wants it is not a norm text of general application, and the standard's own text is sold rather than published, so nothing here is quoted from a clause.
- The Mevzuat Hazırlama Usul ve Esasları Hakkında Yönetmelik is statutory in form. Its madde 21 provides "Tarihler gün, ay ve yıl olarak rakamla yazılır, aralarına eğik çizgi konulur, rakamların solunda sıfır kullanılmaz": figures in day, month and year order, the solidus between them, no leading zero. It also reaches no further than the drafting of Turkish legislation.
- The English Style Guide writes dates out in full in running text, its illustration being 6 June 2016, except in references to the Official Journal, which take the short numeric form; and it allows either the twenty-four-hour reckoning with a leading zero and a colon or the twelve-hour reckoning with a full stop and no leading zero. The Stijlgids Nederlands of the same Directorate-General requires that months never appear in figures in running text, "in een lopende tekst, maanden nooit in cijfers".
The strongest instrument opened is statutory and bounded to one state's legislative drafting; the international standard invites use; everything else is the rule of a named body. The tier is House.
Consequences for translation
A date notation answers to whoever commissioned the text, so a notation that is right in one Dutch document is wrong in another.
- A finding must name the authority and not only the language. "The Dutch date format" is not a fact a reviser can act on.
- What looks like one retention edge is two mechanisms. A date inside matter quoted as evidence of what a document said is retained, because converting it would alter the evidence. A date inside a reference is not retained at all: the guide converts it to a second target form, the short one, precisely because the reference is a reference.
- Padding is a separate decision from order and can be got right or wrong independently of it. A converted date may carry the correct order and still breach the rule on leading zeros.
- Compliance is mechanically checkable, and the cost of failure is asymmetric: a spelled month can only look foreign, while a numeric date in the wrong order reads as a different day for eleven days in twelve.
Examples
EN>NL
- Source: of 6 July 2016
- Target: van 6 juli 2016
- Comment: The act's own date in the title of Regulation (EU) 2016/1191, English and Dutch official versions. The month is spelled in both, which is the Dutch guide's rule as well as the English one, while the same act's footnote references carry the short numeric form. One instrument shows the rule and its exception at once.
EN>TR
- Source: 6 July 2016
- Target: 6/7/2016
- Comment: The form a Turkish legislative draft requires: figures, the solidus between the parts, and no leading zero on the month. The target is derived from madde 21 rather than copied from a printed instance. A translator who carried the English form across would produce a date that is well formed Turkish prose and non-compliant drafting, and one who padded the month would breach the same rule from the other side.
References
- English Style Guide. Directorate-General for Translation, European Commission, eighth edition January 2016, file consulted 3 August 2026. Chapter 6 (Numbers), the rules on dates and times, cited by chapter because the retrieval route returned conflicting section numbers for them.
- ISO 8601-1:2019 and ISO 8601-2:2019, Date and time, Representations for information interchange. International Organization for Standardization. Cited from the organization's public description of the standard; the standard's own text was not opened.
- Mevzuat Hazırlama Usul ve Esasları Hakkında Yönetmelik, put into force by Cumhurbaşkanı Kararı 5210 of 23 February 2022, Resmî Gazete of 24 February 2022, sayı 31760. Madde 21 (Atıfların yapılması), third paragraph, consolidated text on the legislation portal of the Cumhurbaşkanlığı.
- Stijlgids Nederlands. Directoraat-generaal Vertaling, Europese Commissie, vijfde uitgave mei 2025, last amended 21 October 2025. The rule on months in running text, cited by edition; the retrieval route did not return a section number that could be relied on.
- Regulation (EU) 2016/1191 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 6 July 2016 on promoting the free movement of citizens by simplifying the requirements for presenting certain public documents in the European Union, English and Dutch language versions, title.