the best approaches for logging localization using c++

Question

I am working on a multinational project where target audience for logs might be from two nationalities. Therefore it is becoming important to log in more than one language , I am thinking about writing to 2 different log folders based on language every time I am logging something, but I am also wondering if there's some out of the box functionality that is coming along with logging frameworks like log4cpp?

Answer 1

As other commenters have mentioned, it sounds like you are going down the wrong track by looking to do multilingual logging.

My recommendation would be to use English (which is the standard for technical information, and which I guess is the language you know best) and to make sure that the language you use is clear, grammatically correct and unambiguous. Then if one of the technicians cannot understand it, they can very easily and efficiently run it through a machine translation engine such as Google Translate. Or indeed they could process the logs and run everything through Google Translate to append translated text, particularly if you annotate the logs to mark the language content.

Assuming that the input language is well-written, machine transation usually gives a good result which the end user can understand. If the message isn't clear, has typos or abbreviations, then that's where machine translation fails spectacularly.

Answer 2

Writing log naturally brings down the speed of execution due to file open, seek and write operations involved as part of it.

This is one primary reason why many developer and architects suggest to write log at different levels.Increasing the depth of log entries as level increases to trace down the problems better. At higher level, you will notice that your process speed drops due to more log entries getting generated.

Rather suggest you to use services that can translate from one language to other. I'm sure there are libraries free or paid which does this translation. You can create a small utility program that runs in the background and does this conversion during process idle time.

Answer 3

Well one suggestion is you can use a different process/thread which listens for your log messages, which you can log it from there ..

This reduces I/O logging time in your main process/thread and you can make all changes related to Logging language over there..

For multi - Lingual support I think you can try writing with widechar string .. though I am not sure..

Answer 4

the best approaches for logging localization using c++

Install Qt 4 and use QObject::tr/ tr() macro for strings. Write strings in whatever language you want. Hire/Get a translator to localize strings using QT Linguist.

Please note that perfect translation is impossible, so there will be many "amusing" misunderstandings, even if your translator is a genius. So it might be a better idea to select main language for programming team.

--EDIT--

Didn't notice this part before:

in more than one language

One way to approach it is to implement log reader. Instead of writing plaintext messages, you could dump message ids (generated by some kind of macros) and string arguments if strings are formatted. "Log reader" will allow user to select desired language while viewing log file, and translate messages based on their ids/arguments using mechanism similar to QTranslator. The good thing about this approach is that you'll be able to add more languages later - so it'll be possible to retranslate old logs. The bad thing is that this format will be harder to read for "normal human", although you can add plaintext messages in addition to message ids and arguments and you'll need to write log viewer.

Qt 4 has most of this framework implemented (there are routines for dumping variants into text/data streams, and so on) along with translation tool. See QTranslator documentation and Linguist manual for more info.