Globalisation is bringing translation and multilingual information processing to areas where it was previously unknown or relatively unimportant. Today, translation is not only important for reaching global audiences, it is becoming an indispensable component inside other systems and workflows. MALT (Modular Architecture for Linguistic Tools) represents a fresh approach to a relatively new problem; how to provide translation capabilities plus any other vital linguistic tools and components inside a common framework, possibly together with other external applications. MALT’s modular structure and multi-tier architecture simplify integration into complex workflow scenarios, and the functional separation in the MALT interface permits new components to be added extremely quickly. The applications and components running under MALT can be accessed locally, in a network environment or as engines of a distributed client-server system such as DTS.