TANGORA is the prototype of a large vocabulary isolated word recognizer for English developed by IBM Research, USA. IBM research groups in Europe completed experimental Tangora systems for Italian, French, German, and Spanish. Starting from these prototypes, the groups are developing jointly a multi-lingual Tangora integrated in a completely re-designed architecture. It aims at providing a flexible and versatile speech recognizer allowing for running real-life dictation experiments. This paper presents details of the Tangora architecture, problems of the language adaptations and describes the specific issues that have been solved in order to cope with the peculiarities of each language.