This paper discusses a framework for development of bilingual and multilingual comprehension assistants and presents a prototype implementation of an English-Bulgarian comprehension assistant. The framework is based on the application of advanced graphical user interface techniques, WordNet and compatible lexical databases as well as a series of NLP preprocessing tasks, including POS-tagging, lemmatisation, multiword expressions recognition and word sense disambiguation. The aim of this framework is to speed up the process of dictionary look-up, to offer enhanced look-up functionalities and to perform a context-sensitive narrowing-down of the set of translation alternatives proposed to the user.