Nicola at the International Youth Library/Internationale Jugendbibliothek

I took a train to Salzburg in the weekend and went on a hop-on-hop-off bus around the city where I saw several locations where the Sound of Music was filmed. We even had a bit of sun. And on Sunday I went into Munich City Museum which was very interesting, including a full floor of puppets. The weather is getting quite cold now, but the buildings are all very warmly heated. Today I’ve been finishing off the pile of 23 multilingual picturebooks I’ve found so far at the International Jugendbibliothek. This has included what is essentially a vocabulary book with a word a page in thirteen (yes 13) languages: English, Korean, French, Arabic, Vietnamese, Japanese, Portuguese, Lao, Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Cambodian, and Navajo. This book was published in the United States, and the author, Mary Feder, explicitly states it is a ‘playful introduction to languages’. English is privileged in space, size and order throughout the book. Other languages have been chosen to represent the multi...

It’s Friday, and I spent most of the day analysing multilingual books, but also some bilingual books featuring English and an indigenous language, and I’d like to share two of these with you: One is from Taiwan- Where is Mom? Wada inu ka Bubu da? (Huang, 2016) is a story told in English and Truku, an Indigenous Taiwanese language which was only officially recognised by the Chinese government in 2004. The story is of a little girl whose mother does not return from gathering plants and ferns in the mountains one day. She imagines all sorts of terrible things have happened (a bear, a snake bite) but the next day her mother returns safely after having to spend the night in a cave due to fog. She has to go straight to the market to sell her plants before they wilt, but the little girl knows her mother will face no danger in town, and will be safely home that night. The illustrations are vibrant and it seems there were made with children from the Truku community. I was fa...

Today I was working with several multilingual books, including one with eleven, yes eleven languages. I’ll outline three here to give you a feel for the range. The first book entitled The Rights of a Child (2004) is a book about the ten principles of the United Nations Declaration of Children’s Rights presented in the eleven national languages of South Africa: Afrikaans, English, isiNdebele, isiXhosa, isiZula, Sepedi, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, and Xitsong. English, however,   dominates the cover and front matter (including a foreword from Desmond Tutu) of the book. I have read that the ANC has promoted English as the language of government, so maybe this explains its dominance in this book. I also examined Tsunami Mein Verlorenes Paradies/ My Lost Paradise/ Mon paradis perdu/ Mi paraiso perdido which is a book published by the Kinders Kunt Museum ( Museum of Children’s Art) of Berlin recording voices and artistry of children who survived the Boxing Day Tsuna...