The books I
alluded to yesterday are a set of 3 written and illustrated by Lynn Reiser,
published by Greenwillow Books (an imprint of Harper Collins). One is called The Lost Ball/La pelota perdida (2002).
Straight away I loved the endpapers which are filled with pictures of different
kinds of balls: basketballs, soccer balls, tennis balls, golf balls, baseballs,
yarn balls. It kind of acts as a visual glossary, but what is
different about it, is there is only one language label beneath each ball, not
two. So under some of the pictures of a baseball the label is ‘pelota de
beisbol’ and under another the label is ‘baseball’. I liked this approach.
But the best bit
was when I opened the story and saw how the author/illustrator/designer of the
books (I’m not sure who makes these decisions, and it probably varies from
publisher to publisher and maybe from book to book) had decided to represent
Spanish and English on each page. The story is about two boys, each with a dog playing
with a ball. For each dog the ball is thrown, and the dog brings back the wrong
ball. The rest of the book shows the two boys searching for the owner of the
ball their dog has brought back: “Is this your ball?” “No, our ball is a golf
ball”. In the end the boys find each other and are able to exchange balls.
Most of the books
I have been looking at present both languages on the same page, using some kind
of visual cue to separate them. There is usually a space between the two texts,
and often also some kind of small illustration or line between the two texts.
Sometimes a large capital letter is used at the start of the paragraph (I
believe these are called drop caps) using one colour for English and another
for Spanish, and sometimes completely different colours are used for the
entirety of each text. This is what The Lost Ball does: orange is used for
English and green for Spanish, but the unique aspect of the design in this book
is that the two texts are not always identical in meaning because each voice
belongs to a different boy. On the first page there is an English voice in
orange and a picture of Richard with an orange hat and giving his dog with an
orange colour an orange ball, and below is a Spanish voice beside a picture of Ricardo in a green cap giving a
green ball to a different dog with a green collar.
Throughout the
book the orange text (English) belongs to the boy with the orange hat and the
green text (Spanish) belongs to the boy with the green hat. On some pages the
texts say the same thing: “Today is a good day to play ball in the park, Comet”
and “Hoy es un lindo dia a la lepota en
el parquet, Cometa”, and other pages the two texts are different: “Is this your
ball? No, our ball is a tennis ball”
and “Es esta to pelota? No, nuestra
pelota es una pelots de basket” [Is this your ball? No our ball is a basketball].
Aside from the green and orange colours used for the text, the balls, the dog collars
and the boys’ hats, and a range of colours used for the other balls featured,
the illustrations are in black and white, and there is a wonderful double
spread illustrations where both boys can
be seen in the same location looking for the owner of their ball but not yet
seeing each other. In this scene the boys each buy an icecream and cross to the
other side of the page, and from then on the green text is on the LH page and
the orange text is on the RH page. There is so much to see and work out
visually! Of course, finally the boys meet each other, exchange balls, and play
together. In the final page as they farewell each other, there is a mixing of
the languages. I so enjoyed reading this book and working out the clever visual
techniques used by the author/illustrator/designer!
Lynn Reiser has
also written two other books in the collection about two little girls, Margaret
and Margareta, and similar techniques are used for representing the two
languages, this time with pink for English and blue for Spanish. In one book,
the two little girls go to the park with their mothers and meet each other
there. Despite not knowing each other’s language, they play, and by the time their
mothers call them to go home, they are each using some of the other’s language (with
its own colour) embedded in their own language: “Mama this is my amiga [friend]
Margarita, and her gatita [toy cat], Susanna. We had a fiesta [party] and a
siesta [nap]”. Note the square brackets are mine and are not needed in the book
due to the context.
Ofelia Garcia
talks about the idea of ‘translanguaging’, which is a term used to describe how
multilingual people do not keep languages separate; they mix and mingle all of
their linguistic resources according to context. This idea of keeping languages
very separate on different pages or divided by colour can be seen as a very
monolingual approach to language, but Lynn Resier’s books both come to a place
where the languages are mixed in authentic ways. In a way her books kind of
explain translanguaging and language acquisition to readers, and I really
appreciate this approach.
Now, what
treasures will I find today?
No comments:
Post a Comment