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 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).