Peter van Dijck has an interview with the editor in chief of the Dewey Decimal System about translating the DD taxonomy. It’s worth noting that of the 35 translated versions of the DD translations, many strategic languages (Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, French, German etc) are either in progress or are very recent. This experience would provide an interesting case study in translating and managing multilingual taxonomies for some future semantic web, even though DD is a method for classifying books, not concepts.