The transcultural population of most open-border economically developed nations has exhibited significant growth over the last 40 years, and numbers of transcultural persons in special education have grown proportionately. The transcultural person in special education presents certain characteristics, problems, or disorders that have not been diagnosed or rehabilitated successfully. These problems or characteristics concern: (1) general health, where differing customs and availability of medical consultation frequently preclude timely diagnosis; (2) intellectual capacity, where some tests are insufficiently standardized and weighted with reference to specific cultural populations, and tests are administered in an inappropriate language; (3) psychosocial adaptation, entailing loss of the security of the group and separation from the family of origin due to migratory movements; (4) language capacity, as transcultural children are often compound bilinguals in which neither language is perfected and each is asymmetrically contaminated by interferences from the other, and there is a need to create fluency in both target and source language; and (5) specific learning handicaps, which are difficult to diagnose when communication problems exist. (JDD)