In these days, there are many studies to improve the effectiveness of retrieval systems. One method is to use thesaurus in the systems. But the establishment of the saurus independently is very difficult and requiers a great deal of time and labor. The goal of this research is to examine which problems there are. The texts used in the thesis were "Thesaurus of ERIC descriptors(7th ed.1977)" and "KEID Thesaurus(1981)" established by translation. The results of the thesis were as follows, First, there were many differences of equivalence classes of terms between English and Korean. Second, the errors of translation made words inadequate to use as a descriptors. Third, because of differences of traditions, thought and culture, associative relationship and hierarchical relation did not coincide between terns, Fourth, because the terms of the thesaurus of ERIC descriptors serve Western usages, the terms used in Korea were not or insufficient. So it way necessary to add our own therms. As mentioned above, translating a thesaurus for use as a documentation language for indexing and retrieval is not the optimum way of building up a thesaurus.