There are countless children who have their first contact with this wonderful thing called "book" in a foreign language: refugees, immigrants, indigenous children, children of minority languages, or just children in a language community so small that there are no children’s books. For them, books might become a strange thing that makes their parents feel uncomfortable. Perhaps the family feels frustrated and in the worst case, the children feel like they are speaking the “wrong” languages. The hurdle to have a look at another book might become very, very high. We need more bilingual picture books to reach those families and show them the joy of reading together. Showing them that their language is a treasure. We have talked to editors. But they told us that bilingual picture books are nothing to earn money with.

So, the "Bücherpiraten" (book pirates) decided to realize the non-profit project „1001 languages on bilingual-picturebooks.org“. The idea is that children and youngsters can publish their own stories with their own pictures and become storytellers. A network of volunteers translates the books into their mother tongues. The families, schools, kindergartens and libraries all over the word can download the books in their special language combination for free. For as many books as possible we record audio books. So that the families read their own language and listen to the second one.

So far, there have been over 400 children from 4 continents who have written 36 books. More than 200 volunteers have translated the books in over 75 languages. Every 2 or 3 days there is a new translation. There were over 58,000 downloads in more than 920 different language combinations.

The whole project is funded by donors like you. With your help it is possible that families, schools or kindergartens use www.bilingual-picturebooks.org for free!