Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) is a sub field of Information Retrieval (IR). Like IR, in CLIR for a particular information need, we have to find relevant information or documents containing such information. In CLIR multiple tools must be developed to match terms containing same meaning in different languages. The usual solution is to translate the query and/or the documents before performing the search. So translation is pivotal activity in CLIR. In CLIR a wide range of techniques were proposed in the literature for translation. This paper presents a detailed insight of these techniques, with a special emphasis on recent developments.