Abstract This paper presents an overview of challenges and approaches in multilingual coreference resolution. We give an introduction to the terminology used in the field as well as to the basic approaches to resolving coreference relations and discuss the challenges that a system faces when new languages are added. Current systems show that multilinguality can either be approached by adding languages incrementally or it can be part of the original system design. The paper describes the challenges of multilinguality in coreference resolution with respect to existing evaluation criteria, annotation schemes, availability, usability, and accuracy of already existing linguistic tools for preprocessing.