Cross language information retrieval is a subfield of Information Retrieval dealing with retrieving information written in a language different from the language of the user's query.
The first workshop on CLIR was held in Zurich 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 079238122X. Workshops have been held yearly since 2000 at the meetings of the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF).