A method and apparatus is disclosed for compilation of an original Cobol program and building an executable program with support for improved performance by increased parallelism during execution using multiple threads of processing. The approach includes a compilation (or translation) step utilizing a first compiler or translating program which is a parallel aware translating first compiler. The parallel aware first compiler is a specialized compiler/translator which takes as input a Cobol source program, and produces as output an intermediate computer program in a second computer programming language, the intermediate program including parallelization directives, the intermediate program intended for further compilation utilizing an existing selected second compiler, the second compiler providing support for parallelism for programs described in the second programming language. The approach optionally allows for use of pragmas serving as parallelization directives to the compiler in the original Cobol program or in the intermediate program.