Expanding Horizons: New Bilingual Books in Arabic, Chinese, and Haitian Creole

 At All About Books, we have always prioritized offering a wide variety of Spanish-English books for children ages Birth – 5 years. Children’s books in Spanish and English are incredibly helpful for Bilingual households as learning tools, both for children and adults. Over the years, through conversations with customers and meeting with new customer prospects at conferences, we have received more and more requests for other bilingual language offerings, and it makes sense that our customers would like to offer other languages for other bilingual households. However, in 2024, when we decided to expand our offerings, the next big question needed to be answered: What languages do we start with?  

First, we started with our own research. In 2020 and in 2022, we sent out customer surveys to poll our current customer base about what languages they are looking for. We saw some relative consistency between the two sets of survey responses. Still, we also decided to seek out some additional research from our long-time literacy partner, Reach Out and Read. With their help, we could see further what languages they most frequently encountered during visits across the country. Considering all this information, we decided our first 3 language expansions would be Arabic, Chinese, and Haitian Creole. 

The next step in this process was determining what books we wanted to offer in these 3 new languages. Since we publish some of our own books under Chosen Spot Publishing, we had several titles throughout our catalog available to have translated. As a starting point, we decided we wanted to be able to offer a book for each of the ages where a child would be visiting the doctor for a well-child visit, since many of our customers are doing just that. We chose some of our personal favorite series and looked at the best sellers within those series.   

After determining the languages and books, our next step was to hire and work with translators. We contacted some publishing partners for recommendations, hired some of those recommendations, and then sought out additional proofreaders to ensure we accurately represented those languages.  

Bilingual book offerings can be difficult to source from other, larger publishers for an affordable price. We know first-hand how difficult it can be, and in this case, working as a smaller publisher has offered us the flexibility of making these available. All the work and collaboration to make these 15 new books was well worth the time to expand our offerings for our wonderful customers. 

Curious about the role of bilingual books in child development? Check out our blog post on bilingual reading benefits.