Cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) is a subfield of information retrieval dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user's query. For example, a user may pose their query in English but retrieve relevant documents written in French.
The first workshop on CLIR was held in Zürich during the SIGIR-96 conference. The proceedings of this workshop can be found in the book Cross-Language Information Retrieval (Grefenstette, ed; Kluwer, 1998) ISBN 0-7923-8122-X. Workshops have been held yearly since 2000 at the meetings of the Cross Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF).
The term "cross-language information retrieval" has many synonyms, of which the following are perhaps the most frequent: cross-lingual information retrieval, translingual information retrieval, multilingual information retrieval. The term "multilingual information retrieval" refers to CLIR in general, but it also has a specific meaning of cross-language information retrieval where a document collection is multilingual.