Where in the brain is meaning extracted from visual information? I am looking into several systems for improving learning speeds and ran into a question I seem unable to answer on my own:

When we read a word, it somehow gets converted into it's abstract meaning.
To be clear in my further descriptions, I will encapsulate written information into " and abstract information into + 

For example, a person fluent in English and Japanese (or Chinese for this particular example) could look at the letters

"Tree"


and 

"木"


and in both cases convert this information into the internal representation of +tree+.

My questions are


Is my understanding of the reading process accurate?
If yes, what zone(s) of the brain would handle this conversion?
Where in the brain on the 10-20 System would these zones be located?
The short answer is we don't know for sure. Look up "alexia" and "agraphia"; pinpointing the regions of the brain that, if damaged, interfere with reading might give some indication of the cortical regions involved.

Visual cortex (back of the brain) is obviously necessary for the general population, but it's clearly possible for blind people to learn to read without vision. I'm not aware if blind people require an intact visual cortex or not.

There is a nice study showing that semantic information is present in a very compact form in the hippocampus: Invariant visual representation by single-neurons in the human brain.
Quian Quiroga R, Reddy L, Kreiman G, Koch C and Fried I
Nature, 435: 1102-1107; 2005. PDF