Should logging be affected by Internationalisation?

Question

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.