How can groups communicate when they use different languages?

Many office systems are based on various types of messages, forms, or other documents. When users of such systems need to communicate with people who use different document types, some kind of translation is necessary. In this paper, we explore the space of general solutions to this translation problem and propose several specific solutions to it. After first illustrating the problem in the Information Lens electronic messaging system, we identify two partly conflicting objectives that any translation scheme should satisfy: preservation of meaning and autonomous evolution of group languages. Then we partition the space of possible solutions to this problem in terms of the set theoretic relations between group languages and a common language. This leads to four primary solution classes and we illustrate and evaluate each one. Finally, we describe a composite scheme that combines many of the best features of the other schemes. Even though our examples deal primarily with extensions to the Information Lens system, the analysis also suggests how other kinds of office systems might exploit specialization hierarchies of document types to simplify the translation problem.