Designing Bilingual Books for Children

Abstract

The Multilingual Resources for Children Project undertaken at the University of Reading, examines the problems of relating and controlling dual language texts so that the reader perceives the two texts as equally important. The Project was concerned with five languages: Chinese, Gujarati, Bengali, Urdu and Panjabi — the most widely used languages other than English in the United Kingdom. The interdisciplinary team of teachers, linguists and typographers, along with speakers of the project languages, worked to ensure the development of accurate and functional language resources for multilingual schools.