摘要：
Knowledge organization systems such as thesauri are intended to
structure and represent concepts in a domain in a manner that facilitates
their effective employment in knowledge representation, i.e. representation
of subjects of information resources (Classification and indexing)
and users’ queries (search and retrieval). Representation
of ‘aboutness’ of a discourse and of the concepts
in it is, to some extent, a function of the nature and characteristics
of the ‘domain’. Design of multilingual thesauri
for multicultural domains such as ‘spirituality’
present many problems – both structural and semantic. Based
on the experience in working on two multilingual thesauri in culture-specific
domains, the principal issues that arise have been identified and
illustrated with a few examples. The strategies that have been adopted
to overcome the problems are also explained. A few general principles
that could serve as guidelines in building multilingual thesauri
especially in culture-specific domains have been suggested.
