Multilanguage in 1.7.x is getting more and more popular.
(See improvements vs 1.6: http://community.joomla.org/blogs/community/1468-multilang-in-17-whats-new.html )
Normally, we should not introduce new features in a point release.
But multilanguage is dealing with so many factors that it was necessary to help users as soon as possible to check the status of all these variables.
With this in mind, a new module is added in 1.7.1.
Its name is mod_multilangstatus.
It is not published per default . One has to publish it manually.
It is designed to be displayed in the Administrator status bar. Clicking on its icon/name will pop up a modal window with errors –if any– and status of the most important items concerned.
If published when using a mono-language site, the modal will just display that multilanguage is not implemented.
Once your multilanguage site is set correctly and no more errors showing, it can be safely unpublished.
Here are the steps to follow and the kind of resulting modals one can get.
1. Go to the module manager, filter by 'Administrator' and 'status' position, publish the module.
2. The module now shows in the status bar.
3. If the site is a mono-language site and none of the multilanguage aspects are wrongly enabled/published, the modal will just display:
4. If all the multilanguage variables are set as should, one will get:
5. If something is wrong somewhere *except for the structure of categories/items and specific issues for some templates*, one may get that kind of display:
A little history about this module.
Originally, some code was created by Christophe Demko as Notices/Errors when logging in back-end. This was heaviily depending on sessions checks in order to not display the errors for each page in the Administrator interface..
I then worked on this and made it a CPanel module with errors as well as statuses, so the users would easily at any time take a pick and check if all was OK.
I asked Dennis Hermatski if it could be made as a status module so that one would not need to go to the Control panel to check. He did a great job, making it ajax and it worked fine from the status bar..
Rouven Weßling remarked that it was not using the current model we use for modals and gracefully changed this to use a new view in com_languages.
Some more tweaks, quite a few testers, and it is now in trunk grace to Mark Dexter who accepted this "new feature" to get in for 1.7.1.
A good example of collaboration between all these volunteers 
When 1.7.1 will be released, do not forget to update! It contains many other improvements and bug/fixes.
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