Amharic is the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic ofrnEthiopia. On the other hand, English serves as medium of instruction andrncommunication in educational centers, working language in governmental and nongovernmentalrnorganizations in Ethiopia. Thus, experimenting on the applicability of arncross language information retrieval system for Amharic-English that can break thernlanguage barrier is important. This research is conducted to break the languagernbarrier that users face in obtaining and using documents prepared in Amharic andrnEnglish. Amharic is the official working language of the Federal Democratic Republic ofrnEthiopia. On the other hand, English serves as medium of instruction andrncommunication in educational centers, working language in governmental and nongovernmentalrnorganizations in Ethiopia. Thus, experimenting on the applicability of arncross language information retrieval system for Amharic-English that can break thernlanguage barrier is important. This research is conducted to break the languagernbarrier that users face in obtaining and using documents prepared in Amharic andrnEnglish.rnThe method that is employed to conduct the experimentation is a corpus-basedrnapproach. This approach requires availability of a large volume of parallel documentsrnprepared in Amharic and English. The documents that were collected to conduct thisrnresearch are news articles and legal items.The performance of the system was measured by precision and recall. At the firstrnphase of the experimentation, precision values were very low - the highest being 0.2rnand 0.3 for Amharic and English respectively. This was due to the index term listrnwhich could not fully represent the documents used for the experimentation. Thernprocess of indexing removed important terms from index list which resulted in lack ofrndocuments to be retrieved for most of the queries. Thus, the index list was modified,rni.e., all the terms which occur in the corpus with the exception of stop words werernused. This showed the increase in precision values - the highest being 0.36 andrn0.33 for Amharic and English documents respectively. Therefore, with the use ofrnsufficiently large and cleaned parallel Amharic-English document collection, it isrnpossible to develop a cross language information retrieval for the language pairs.