CAPL, Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon, is a project developed by Dr. Michael Shaughnessy at Washington & Jefferson College. The purpose of CAPL is to provide images that demonstrate the true meaning and intention of the words in a language. CAPL currently has collections of images for teaching and learning English (North American), German, French, Chinese, and Spanish. Later this year CAPL will expand to include images for Italian, Japanese, Russian, and Portuguese. All of the images in the collection are licensed under a Creative Commons license that allows for re-use and manipulation for non-commercial purposes.
Applications for Education
CAPL could be a good resource for foreign language teachers to use in constructing lessons. You could create a simple vocabulary matching game using CAPL. Simply copy and paste some of the images into a column then list vocabulary words in another column.
Here are some related resources that may be of interest to you:
TED Talks in 40 Languages
Three Good Resources for ESL/ELL Teachers
Pronunciation Animations