title: Localizing reason phrase in status line of the RESTful HTTP API reponse
body: <p>We have a RESTful API exposed over HTTP that in a natural way makes use of HTTP status-line (status-code and reason-phrase) to communicate the API result to the client (<a href="http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec6.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.w3.org/Protocols/rfc2616/rfc2616-sec6.html</a>). </p>
  
  <p>For example we have the following status line for a concurrency error:</p>
  
  <p>HTTP/1.1 409 Resource updated by a different user. Reload and try again.</p>
  
  <p>It recently turned out those messages will be presented to the end users of the application built against our API meaning we need to localize them. <strong>I'm wondering if this is an accepted approach in such scenarios, especially considering non-ASCII charset of those messages, or should the reason phrase (status description) be kept only as low level message and any content that will make its' way to the user screen should be passed in the response body? Is there anything that can bite us later on if we choose to localize the reason-phrase part?</strong></p>
  
  <p>In this case we would like to use the response body to pass the new version of the resource to the API client and including additional data doesn't see to play nicely with that.</p>