The tutorial will begin with a look at the English language as the international language of science and technology. Although broadly used all over the world by native and second language speakers it has its challenges when used for information retrieval. These can be spelling, multiple meaning, synonyms, terminology, and so on. Some selected cases are given with problem solving proposals. As a next step, approaches and tools will be presented for monolingual searching in multilingual document collections using English terms in (machine) translated text. Background for this will be an overview of the state of the art of machine translation.
At least as far as patent documents are concerned the significance of further languages beyond English increase. This seems to be particularly dramatic for non-Latin script languages that also bring new problems to Latin script search systems. As the promising concept Cross Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) using query translation will be discussed in detail. Several examples will illustrate pros and cons of this approach.
Finally an overview of approaches is given how to circumvent the language gap as it can be done for example by using classification systems. The tutorial will close with a look ahead to future developments in handling language in information retrieval.
