So we're looking at the possibility of porting our software to support multiple languages and one of the areas we're going to have to deal with is error messages and other notifications.

These obviously have to be reported to the users in their own language. Our team (largely) only speak English and even if we were all multi-lingual we're looking at selling to a wide range of countries and could never expect to have a reasonable number of people speaking all languages (we're a small company).

The obvious way to get round the language issue when errors or other messages we may get asked about which are being reported is error numbers which would be consistent across language. While these are going to exist in the backend (if only as key on the error message), I'd really rather not throw them at users if we don't have to but I don't have any other solution.

Anyone have any useful suggestions for alternatives?