If you’re trying to format something for output (e.g. leading zeros, only 1 decimal place or whatever… you know, format specifiers in printf) you are setting a property on the stream, not on what you’re converting. So if you have a thread running that sets a format, adds something to the stream, and then unsets the format, you cannot have another thread able to come in and do something to that stream. Look out for thread unsafe cout code.
gettext is what everybody uses. You cannot get a page into the manual before it tells you that translators may want to change the order of what