I believe using your own language is fine (please see my other comment). That said, you can still use pictures together with example sentences. You don't have

I believe using your own language is fine (please see my other comment). That said, you can still use pictures together with example sentences. You don't have to find a picture that unambigously means "hope". It can be a picture of the Red Sox or your $favorite_underdog for instance, the dvd cover of a movie related to hope, etc. The point is to improve recall, not "skip the translation step".