Should logging be affected by Internationalisation?

Question

Hi,

We are currently looking into shipping our set of products to other parts of the world. We will be ensuring that all strings and date formats,etc in the user interfaces reflect the language and culture of the target country.

Should our log files and error reporting also be changed in this way? Considering the customers may dip into the log files or we may have a support team local to that country, troubleshooting and reporting of problems would be made easier if the relevant reports were in their language. However, the developers all speak English and ulimately, if the issue cannot be fixed by the support team, the reports and log files will end up with them and possibly need translating?

Thanks

Answer 1

All messages presented to the user should be in the local language.

Unless the log files are an essential part of your application I'd leave them in English. Your local support teams should have reasonable English skills.

If you do have to translate the messages, why not log the error number as well as the message in the local language. You can then look up the error number and get the English text from your code base. No extra translation needed.

Answer 2

Error messages that are visible to the user should be translated, an error message in a language you don't understand is pretty irritating.

I would leave log files that are used for troubleshooting untranslated, assuming your support teams usually speak english. Every translation costs money/time, I would not spend that for messages that are invisible for the users.

Answer 3

Part of the log message could be localization-independent log message identifier, such as including the errno in error messages, along with the output from strerrno.

For an example, type :Q<enter> into vim, and you get back E492: Not an editor command: Q.

E492 can be looked up easily (:help E492) and translators can easily give local translations that are meaningful.

Answer 4

Log files are for the developers/debuggers. If they can understand development language in english, they definitely should understand the debugging logs. Internationalizing the logs would be an overkill in my opinion.

Answer 5

Don't bother translating log messages, as long as your second and third line support staff understand English. Otherwise, you're just going to introduce more confusion into your incident and problem management.

However, logging whatever error or warning messages are shown to the end users in the translated language (as well as the English version) might be a good idea, to help first line support provide information to your second line support.