Attending to the UNESCO, there are around 6500 languages in the world. The 90% of the languages do not appear at Internet. In our global world the tendency is to use common languages (as English or French) for business, for commerce, for education, for any interchange of information. It does not seem to be a problem in societies where the general education incorporates any of the common interchange languages. But what happens with developing countries where a significant part of the population do not speak any language apart from its mother tongue? How are they going to access information? How local knowledge (for example traditional medicine, local literature, etc.) is going to be transmitted?. The need of multilingual dictionaries for minority languages is clear. Indeed, during the last years a phenomenon very interesting is taking place: emerging countries (China, India, Brazil, ...) are starting commerce exchanges and investments in some African countries. Bilingual dictionaries Chinese-Swahili, Hindi-Kirundi, Portuguese-Oromo could be an interesting tool for these and other activities.
Nevertheless it is almost impossible to find bilingual people to develop this dictionaries. Using an intermediate natural language to obtain the translation (i.e. Chinese-French-Swahili) entails a problem of ambiguity in many terms. The quality of the resulting dictionary is impoverished and in some topics it can be very deficient.
We are working in a new method for producing bilingual dictionaries (it can be seen as a multilingual dictionary) without the risk of introducing additional ambiguity by using the so-called Universal Words (more than 200,000) from the English lexical database WordNet. Adding a language to a multilingual dictionary based on Universal Words (UW) consists in searching the equivalent term for a given UW and does not require looking for equivalents in the other working languages.

Present situation: Nowadays there are groups of people working in the translation of a subset of words in Kirundi (from Burundi), Swahili (from Tanzany), Amaric and Oromo (from Ehiopia). This vocabulary is already translated into French, Spanish and English.