This paper investigates how semantic frames from FrameNet can be re-used for constructing FrameNets for other languages. Section one provides a brief overview of Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982). Section 2 introduces the main structuring principles of the Berkeley FrameNet project. Section three presents a typology of FrameNets for different languages, highlighting a number of important issues surrounding the universal applicability of semantic frames. Section four shows that while it is often possible to reuse semantic frames across languages in a principled way it is not always straightforward because of systematic syntactic differences in how lexical units express the semantics of frames. Section five summarizes the issues discussed in this paper.