Picturebooks in ELT: Picturebook formats

Picturebooks in ELT

Passionate about picturebooks

Welcome to my blog about picturebooks in ELT.

“A picturebook is text, illustrations, total design; an item of manufacture and a commercial product; a social, cultural, historic document; and foremost, an experience for a child. As an art form it hinges on the interdependence of pictures and words, on the simultaneous display of two facing pages, and on the drama of the turning page.” (Barbara Bader 1976:1)

My intention is to discuss picturebooks, in particular the pictures in them! Why? Because, in ELT we tend to select picturebooks because they contain words our students might know. I plan to write something a couple of times a month, sharing what I discover in my readings; describe new titles I come across; discuss particular illustrators and their styles and generally promote the picture in picturebooks.

From January 2008 to December 2011 I benefitted from a PhD research grant from FCT, in Portugal.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Picturebook formats

Technical problems - back with you soon!

3 comments:

Sandie Mourão said...: A message sent from Opal Dunn:
"It is good to have a blog written by some one who is so passionate about picturebooks and so well informed, too. Congratulations Sandie for sparing the time and making the effort to blog us such pleasurable and informative reading.

Having published in the ELT market and also written picturebooks published in the UK trade market I have had experience across the range of children’s publishing. When I started to write picturebooks 20 years ago, I was surprised to find that there was little communication between the UK Trade and Education publishers and publishers in ELT, even if they both belonged to the same company............

Total Design seems to be taking on yet another dimension. More and more picturebooks seem to be written and illustrated by an artist. In these cases the artist seems to be designing their own style of text, switching from capitals to varying fonts for smaller letters often no longer laying out words in straight lines. This adds to the holistic design of the whole........but makes reading quite difficult and more laborious for the L1 or L2(English) learner who is still in the process of decoding text to get meaning. Think of the Chinese child for whom reading roman letters is difficult as one stroke can alter the meaning of a Chinese character or an Arabic reader who is learning to read from left to right and vowel sounds may or may not be marked by an overlying dot.
Of course it can be overcome by mediation from a supportive adult BUT it takes time and additional text decoding to get meaning and mood (humour, fright, excitement) conveyed by size, spacing and use of capitals, exclamation marks etc

Translated Books
For many years I have discussed with Trade publishers (Trade, Educational, ELT Publisher appear to be the main groups in Children’s Publishing) about the lack of translation into English of superb picture books published in other languages. I have never got very far although I notice many Japanese picture books are translated into French.

As far as I can make out the main reasons are
lack of funds
a feeling that UK Publishers already publish sufficient for the UK market

This said, in order to publish a non UK published picturebook, the UK based publisher has to buy the publishing rights. Rights officers are generally specialists, often trained in foreign languages as they have to sell rights as well as buy rights. If their Company brief is that there is no money for buying rights, they obviously will not look with enthusiasm for new foreign picture books.
Translation is also a question. Is the translator a specialist in language for young children and emergent readers? Do they know how children learn to read in English and thus know which of a choice of words would be right for a child who is not yet a fluent reader? A word for word translation may not be sufficient. Humour can be different from culture to culture. Pictures may be culturally loaded and thus the translated text might need some filling out if the child is to get meaning.

This said there are some publishers like Zero to Ten that seem to specialise in publishing books translated from French Publishers."; 4 July 2010 08:15
Sandie Mourão said...: Thanks Opal for your nice long comment with some thought provoking ideas.

What you say about authors now writing their own texts is interesting, and something I like to see very much, (but hadn’t thought of it in terms of confusing L2 readers, probably because I am Eurobased.) I’m thinking of Oliver Jeffers and Sara Fanelli in particular.

As to translating – yes, I’m becoming very interested in two companies in the North of Spain who publish the same title in different versions, (Eng, It, Fr, Sp, Basque) - they have a market for their English books in the US but not the UK. I’m interested in the ‘pluriculturalness’ of these books, which are often stories from other countries, illustrated by someone from somewhere else. Altogether they provide the reader with a mixture of influences all accessible in English.
Kalandraka http://www.kalandraka.com/
OQO http://www.oqo.es/

UK publishers are very traditional and don’t like to take chances with titles which may deal with topics that are particularly risky. OQO publishes some interesting titles, one in particular is Smoke
http://www.oqo.es/editora/en/content/smoke It's about a child in a concentration camp. It is a beautifully illustrated book, but not available in England, despite being in English. They have another about living in cardboard boxes, 'Caja de cartón' http://www.oqo.es/editora/es/content/caja-de-cartón but won’t be translating it into English as there isn’t the market.

We can draw whatever conclusion we wish about British publishers, but it is a shame that picture books in other languages, which are very exciting in many different ways, are not brought into the UK and made available to the English language market.

Sandie; 4 July 2010 08:26
BookFairy said...: Hi there again Sandie,

I wish I could know so much about picture books and children's books as you know...I wish I could analyse them so well an in detail...it's a fascinating world...

Anyway...I believe this blog is a great opportunity for me to learn a lot...it inspires me...thanks a lot...

All the best
BookFairy; 17 August 2010 18:35