Terms

Subscribe with RSS

Children's Book Fair

March 17, 2008

I really wish I spoke Italian. Especially as I’ve just spent an extremely long time on the phone to an Italian baker who speaks no English. What I was trying to do was order an enormous cake with a picture of Angelina Ballerina on it for her 25th birthday party this year at the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna which is in Italy. (It’s where Bolognaise sauce comes from). Luckily for me, Jen who I sit next to does speak Italian and she was able to explain in an ever-so-cool and fluent way what exactly it was that we wanted. Phew! After all, you can’t have a party without cake now can you?

Publishers from all around the world will be going to the Children’s Book Fair (and Angelina’s party) to buy and sell books from other countries. Jen and I work in the Rights Department at Puffin and so we will be going to sell our wonderful books to other countries all around the world. Take Angelina for example, she’s already published in 19 different languages! We leave in 3 weeks now and I’m getting extremely excited at the thought of all that pizza and ice cream… oh and of course I’m also really looking forward to showing off all the shiny new books that we’re taking with us. You can have a sneaky peek by visiting this site and clicking Puffin Rights Guides.

Did you know that whilst ducks in England go ‘quack quack’, in France they go ‘kwang kwang’? No it’s not a bad joke – it’s just that different languages spell the same sounds in very different ways. Which I hadn’t realised until the rest of my department started talking about the sound effects in the Silverfin graphic novel (one of our brand new titles based on the Young Bond book by Charlie Higson). They were worried that the sound effects that go in the speech bubbles like ‘owch’ and ‘aargh’ would be hard to translate, especially into languages that have different alphabets all together.

Anyway, its back to thinking about ice-cream, I mean books for me!

Ciao

Naomi Cartwright and Jen Greenway
Rights Assistant and Rights Executive

Remember that by posting a comment you are agreeing to the website Terms of Use. If you consider any content on this site to be inappropriate, please report it to Penguin Books by emailing reportabuse@penguin.co.uk

Posted at 04:11 PM in Children's Book Fair | Permalink | TrackBack (0)

© 1995 - 2008 Penguin Books LTD

Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy

Registered Number: 861590 England
Registered Office: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL