Hello! Our govt partner has decided to require all the Bloom books to be bilingual for printing and sharing on Bloom library. It is exciting that they want to use L1 more in education, but it is creating a real challenge for book layout that is pleasing, easy to navigate, and not too complicated for local Bloomers.
In order to “obey” our levels and other guidelines, we are having trouble getting everything onto pages and then also doing this in 7 national languages. All books are now twice as long, nicely laid-out with the L1 in the beginning of the book and national language in the second half of the book. This is easier for the local Bloomers, but will be REALLY expensive to print and will make less copies available. Something like this question might be helpful. We can develop the book in national language, use it as a source, and then add the L1 section to the same book. It is hard to lay out both sections separately. The book is long!
I would love to find others who have explored this more than I have! I have done lots of Blooming for Little Zebra Books bookshelf and am familiar with Enterprise, etc.
They also want to do A6 books BILINGUALLY for longer stories and I am struggling with the layouts. I do not like the automatic two language layout in Bloom where the text box splits. Even if you set L1 and L2 to different styes like using italic for one, it isn’t “equal” enough and for fluent reading in any of the languages, there is a challenge. I prefer top of page to be L1 and bottom of page L2.
Here is a sample of a level 3 book in A6 size. AND they wanted to limit the number of pages!
Comments and help appreciated. Thanks!
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