Multiplying Local Language Books with Quality

• In Event: Best practices and innovations in children’s storybook publishing: public-private partnerships, quality translations, open licensing, and pooled procurement

Proposal

High quality translations are important because they hold the power to create more quality stories for children to read. This is valuable especially in languages where written stories are scarce. In South Africa, for example, the publishing industry focuses on Afrikaans and English, while African-language storybooks remain few, all nine of them. With quality translations, however, a publisher, NGO, writer or others can take a single written story and multiply it into more.

This session will outline ways of multiplying stories from one language to others so they can be accessible to many children. Strategies used in multiplying the languages will be discussed in full. Examples of these strategies are translation, adaptation and versioning. The session will also look into definitions for these.

Instead of outlining “the right way to do it”, this paper provides guiding questions and examples to consider when versioning. The aim is to help create parameters for creating great translations that lead to exciting, engaging stories for children in more languages.

Focus will be on the benefit of versioning as a key principle when versioning from one African language to the other. Example of these cultural diversities will be discussed in detail. Like, in Tshivenda, men and women use different phrases for greetings. In Sepedi an elderly person is referred to in the plural when addressed by a younger person.(1)

The learnings in this paper came from the Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Project and funded by the REACH trust fund at the World Bank and the Global Book Alliance. The goal of the REACH Project is to impact the children’s storybook industry in South Africa to ensure all children have exciting stories to read. For this project we produced 4 stories for each of the 5 languages. Then the stories were versioned in 6 languages and the final product was 120 high quality high interest stories for early – grade children.

1. http://www.PanSALB: translating in African Languages.

Author

• Naomi Mositsa, Room to Read