You just finished a development of a new component/module/plugin, which has multilanguage support, or just finished a translation of such a Joomla addon and want to doublecheck the result, and don't know how to do it? Don't look further, Joomla supports some useful debugging mechanisms that can make it easier to locate untranslated strings and diagnose problems with language translations in installed extensions.

Sometimes it is necessary to include specially formatted fields within a string to be translated. This usually happens where numbers are involved but can occur for dates and times or when precise formatting instructions are required.

You might think, that this is an easy job, you just set up sh404SEF, and you're done! Maybe... but sometimes this might be really wrong. Especially if you have a multilingual site, and a properly built Joomla 1.7+ template.

Joomla is a truly international application and supports the translation of all strings contained within it. Templates are no exception on this. They are a bit neglected, but a little extra time spent here will ensure that the strings used in your templates are translatable will pay back - and will give you an edge over your competitors.