Now a days, number of Web Users accessing information over Internet is increasing day by day. A huge amount of information on Internet is available in different language that can be access by anybody at any time. Information Retrieval (IR) deals with finding useful information from a large collection of unstructured, structured and semi-structured data. Information Retrieval can be classified into different classes such as monolingual information retrieval, cross language information retrieval and multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) etc. In the current scenario, the diversity of information and language barriers are the serious issues for communication and cultural exchange across the world. To solve such barriers, cross language information retrieval (CLIR) system, are nowadays in strong demand. CLIR refers to the information retrieval activities in which the query or documents may appear in different languages. This paper takes an overview of the new application areas of CLIR and reviews the approaches used in the process of CLIR research for query and document translation. Further, based on available literature, a number of challenges and issues in CLIR have been identified and discussed.