{"id":2181,"date":"2022-02-02T17:30:40","date_gmt":"2022-02-02T15:30:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/?p=2181"},"modified":"2022-02-02T17:30:40","modified_gmt":"2022-02-02T15:30:40","slug":"anniversary-thoughts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/2022\/02\/02\/anniversary-thoughts\/","title":{"rendered":"Anniversary Thoughts"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

It’s been ten years since I started this bilingual adventure. It started with a French friend of mine – a children’s book illustrator – whose grandkids were being brought up in Brussels by their French mother and Irish dad. Marie felt that her high-school English couldn’t keep up with her grandkids’ knowledge of English, and she was afraid of being left out. So: could we do a bilingual book together? Sure. But not for a nano-second did I think of doing it the traditional way (completely translated with left-side French and right-side English). After all, at age 6, we moved to Montreal from Holland and I was thrown into a new school, new language, with no ill effects. In Montreal, code switching is an art!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our dog Betty was French, so she spoke French – a no-brainer. We inherited a cat from our neighbour, so it was logical that Cat would speak English. When I pitched the book to a potential French agent ages ago, she wanted me to switch languages. For her, cats were the smarter critter, so it was “logical” that he should speak French; we didn’t get into the fact that most people think cats are female and dogs are male! According to one educator, this was another plus – gender diversity!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Over the years, I’ve been blessed with tremendous feedback<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Feedback often comes from grandparents who are in the same boat as Marie, and get the concept. At a Christmas fair, one young woman bought a bunch saying her father would be thrilled: he could finally read to his grandson in both languages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of my favourite comments came from a nine-year-old French boy. I’d given the kids in his class each a Betty & Cat book – their teacher is a friend of mine who has turned what was an exclusively French school into a bilingual one (more on that later!). Each of the kids wrote me a thank-you note. This one stood out: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

For this dear child (whose name really is “Wisdom”) authors tend to be dead!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One world, so many languages!<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

One year, my sister-in-law in Atlanta bought a book for every kid in her grandson’s class. Half the kids were Latino, and so with their Spanish\/English books, they could all be on the same page.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When stories about the “kids in cages” in America were everywhere, I got an order for a Spanish\/English book from a woman in McAllen, Texas. The name of course was infamous. I wrote and asked what she wanted the book for. Turns out she was a volunteer at the camp. They discovered that one of the few things that calmed the kids, was being read to aloud. I shipped a bunch of books her way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My husband’s colleague has a daughter who works with kids in the eastern jungle region of Guatemala. \u00a0The students are indigenous Mayans, so Spanish is actually their second language – their native tongue is Q’ecchi, one of many Mayan dialects. \u00a0The kids become fluent in Spanish very quickly and most yearn to learn English as well. We ended up shipping a bunch of books their way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I’d love to find an agent to help take Betty & Cat further. The potential language combinations are endless, but the necessary energy and investments to do these on my own aren’t. For example, I get plenty of requests for a German\/Italian or German\/English version. Recently, I got a book order from a young educator working with kids on the German\/Polish border. Her wish? “Maybe we’ll be able to encourage people there to develop complementary bilingual material for adolescents who [want] to stay in the region but want to open their space of communication to gain a 360 Radius instead of just one side of the river.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yup!\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s been ten years since I started this bilingual adventure. It started with a French friend of mine – a children’s book illustrator – whose grandkids were being brought up in Brussels by their French mother and Irish dad. Marie … Lees verder →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nieuws"],"translation":{"provider":"WPGlobus","version":"3.0.2","language":"nl","enabled_languages":["en","nl","fr","es"],"languages":{"en":{"title":true,"content":true,"excerpt":false},"nl":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"fr":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false},"es":{"title":false,"content":false,"excerpt":false}}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2181"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2181\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2189,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2181\/revisions\/2189"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bettyandcat.com\/nl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}