Nicola at the International Youth Library/Internationale Jugendbibliothek

Today I have been focussing on more bilingual books in the White Raven Catalogue published by the language specialists at the Internationale Jugendbibliotek (IJB). Some of you will know about this prestigious catalogue of ‘extraordinary and innovative books for children and adolescents’ which has been going since 1993, and includes oner three and a half thousand books from 84 countries in 60 different languages. As part of my work here I have been looking at seven bilingual picturebooks in this collection- one of them is the Poems of the Night book I wrote about yesterday. Another bilingual picturebook in the White Raven catalogue is our very own Mōtītī Blue and the Oil Spill , a narrative non-fiction picturebook self published by Debbie McCauley in Tauranga which focuses on a little blue penguin affected by the oil spill from the Rina disaster. The narrative text is presented in English and Māori, and it is a beautiful book. I have heard Debbie McCauley speak about her personal ...

I had a wonderful time today analysing some of the books I found yesterday. Probably my favourite is called Poemes du Soir (Evening Poems, Heredia & Dentan, 2016) which is a collection of 9 poems presented in both French in Latin script and Arabic in Arabic script. The dilemma of how to give equal weight to both languages is to a large extent avoided because of the different conventions associated with each script. Latin script is traditionally written and read left to right, and Arabic script, right to left. http://whiteravens.ijb.de/book/600 Before you read the details in the next few paragraphs (which may or may not make sense without the actual book in front of you), let me describe the book first. Basically, when you hold the book in your hands, ready to read from left to right as we usually do with most European language books,   the cover facing you is all in French. And you can read the whole book in this left to right manner. But if you hold the book as your ...

The weather is much colder today, and I’ve been wearing merino layers to work. We even had our lunch inside. The castle cafe had red candles lit on each table, which created a lovely warm atmosphere. But in between all of that, I did get some work done. Mostly today I was methodically searching the IJB catalogue for ployglot books listed under hundreds of country codes. I managed to find about four more hidden multilingual picturebooks which I’ve now ordered from the stacks. I also had an interesting meeting with some of the language specialists who work at the IJB tracking down a few other books which they have borrowed at the moment, and they were able to alert me to a few other books not even on my list. After I finished work,  I called in to the ‘Lending Library’ which is essentially a public library open from 2pm-6pm each day. It was full of parents and children, and lots of lovely noise. Many of the children had bike helmets on as they have all ...