We address the multilingual and semantic upgrades of two digital catalogues of motifs and types in folk-literature: the Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature (TMI) and the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification system (ATU). The methods convert, translate, and represent their digitized content in terms of various (so far often implicit) structural and linguistic components. The results will enable (i) utilizing these resources for semi-automatic analysis and indexing of texts of relevant genres, in a multilingual setting, and (ii) pre-processing the data, for analysing motif sequences in folktale plots. We plan to publish the resulting data, which can be made available in the Linked Open Data (LOD) framework.