At the global IA session, they talked about one of the troubles with translation, which is that single-word concepts in one language exist in others only in paragraph form. I have a good example in my room-- in French, the soup is a champignon veloute, in english it's cream of mushroom. Veloute is a pureed soup that is especially fine, which doesn't require cream necessarily. Cream soups often have chunks (in this case, likely of mushrooms) and smooth pureed nature is not needed. English has no word for the veloute, so you woudl have to describe the method to accurately translate it. On this menu, the two are not the same concepts, but simple "close enough" translations. Luckily this soup was both a cream soup and a veloute.

day two of preconferences. (this on one seamntic web practical applications, v. nifty)

Lots of interesting stuff in thsi series-- in particular the global IA session and its attendant implications I found facinating. The session was less about IA and more about understanding, interacting with and perhaps even shaping culture via translation & internationaliation activities.

If you realize that categorization is essentially a framing activity, a la lakoff, then taxonomy translation (as opposed to localization) is an imperialist activity.