When you are transforming from a date field in the source to a date field in the target, Transformation Manager will automatically undertake the necessary conversions.
However, when one of the values is a string and the other is a date, Transformation Manager will convert the data based on the international date mechanism. As such it is possible to:
A note about Dates and Times in XSDs
XML models loaded from an XSD have to use the fixed non-internationalised styles of lexical representation forced by XSD (which is "CCYY-MM-DD" in W3C terminology or yyyy-MM-dd in Java style see http://www.w3c.org). There is no choice in this matter. Thus if you want an American or British style "date" field you simply cannot use XSD date for this purpose. You must declare a XSD string type for this purpose setting whatever facets you require. This is a very important principle that effects ALL systems using XSD defined XML not just TM Design Tool. If you are not getting this problem in other systems then your XML tools are simply not XSD compliant and are ignoring the data types.