[Sigia-l] translating taxonomies

[Peter Van Dijck]

Hi all,
I am looking on the experiences from the LIS folks and others on 
translating taxonomies. I am sure there is a wealth of experience hidden 
with the librarians, who have been translating taxonomies for a long 
time, but the only thing I have been able to find so far is the ISO 
standard: "Guidelines for the establishment and development of 
multilingual thesauri" which is available for 125$.

Recommendations for places to search (even if they require subscriptions 
or something) are also welcome.

I am also looking for practical experiences in projects. Feel free to 
contact me personally (peter at piir but happy dit cim - remove spaces 
and replace the i's with o's). I will write up a list of resources at 
the end of this thread.

Some initial thoughts - please comment:

- not all categories exist in all languages/countries/cultures. There is 
no English word for the French category "cognac" I believe, for example. 
"SUV" is a category of car only used in the US. (Correct me if I'm wrong 
here.)
- Langauge is messy and not all labels can be simply translated. (Examples?)
- what degree of freedom (to re-arrange the taxonomy) should translators 
be given?
- of course local taxonomies are often different from one another to 
start with.
- what types of taxonomies *can* be easily translated directly?

and so on...

Thanks!
Peter