Publisher's Synopsis
Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book in the world. Afrikaans is an Indo-European Language. Afrikaans is a language read and spoken by 18 to 24 million people in South Africa and Namibia, and to a lesser extent in Botswana and Zimbabwe. Winnie-the-Pooh is less popular in Africa than it is in other countries because there are no bears in Africa.
Afrikaans is a mixture of Dutch and several African languages including Bantu and Zulu. Indians and Malays who were brought here by the British have also made contributions to the language.
Afrikaans is the second most widely spoken language in South Africa, after English. It is spoken as the primary language by 22% of the population. It is taught in the schools of South Africa.
The purpose of this book is to help Afrikaans speakers learn English and to help English speakers learn Afrikaans. To have a translation as close as possible to the original is the most useful. The name for Winnie-the-Pooh in Afrikaans is Poeh. The Rabbit is Hasie. Christopher Robin is Christof Robertus.
Ishi Press has reprinted translations of Winnie-the-Pooh into 30 languages thus far. We have published it in Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish, Yiddish, Hindi, Urdu, Khowar, Kalasha and Latin. We have six more languages lined up, including Japanese and Latvian.
This translation into Afrikaans is part of project to translate Winnie-the-Pooh into other languages. The idea is children need to learn to read at an early age and the best way to teach them to read is to provide reading materials that they find interesting. Children around the world laugh when they see Winnie-the-Pooh saying and doing silly things. Since Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book world-wide, translating this book into the different languages of the world will be conducive to teaching children to read in those languages.
