Recent advances in research tools for the systematic analysis oftextual data are enabling exciting new research throughout the socialsciences. For comparative politics scholars who are often interestedin non-English and possibly multilingual textual datasets, theseadvances may be difficult to access. This paper discusses practicalissues that arise in the the processing, management, translation andanalysis of textual data with a particular focus on how proceduresdiffer across languages. These procedures are combined in two appliedexamples of automated text analysis using the recently introducedStructural Topic Model. We also show how the model can be used toanalyze data that has been translated into a single language viamachine translation tools. All the methods we describe here are implemented in open-source software packages available from the authors.