Winnie-the-Pooh in Sinhalesé
Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book in the world. This is the first translation of Winnie-the-Pooh into Sinhalese, the language of Sri Lanka. We believe the reason Winnie-the-Pooh has not caught on in Sri Lanka is there are no bears in Sri Lanka. Winnie-the-Pooh is most popular in countries where there are a lot of bears, such as Russia. Sinhalesé is a language spoken by 18 million people. Sinhalese is also called Singhala, Singhalese and Cingalese. It belongs to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages.
Sinhalese is one of the official and national languages of Sri Lanka. Sinhalese played a major role in the development of Theravada Buddhist literature. Sinhalese is only spoken in Sri Lanka. However, a million Sinhalese speakers have gone to Middle Eastern countries such as Dubai and Saudi Arabia as workers. This may have an impact. One of my daughters is a fluent speaker of Sinhalese because she learned it from our domestic servants while she was a child. If you want to hear Sinhalese spoken, go to the movies "Elephant Walk" starring Elizabeth Taylor or "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." There you can also see lots of Sri Lankan elephants, which are larger than Indian elephants with a head with bumps shaped differently than Indian elephants. It is believed that elephants came to Sri Lanka before humans did.
The purpose of this book is to help Sinhalesé speakers learn English and to help English speakers learn Sinhalesé. To have a translation as close as possible to the original is the most useful. Ishi Press has reprinted translations of Winnie-the-Pooh into 39 languages thus far. We have published it in Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Cebuano, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Sinhalese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Yiddish, Hindi, Urdu, Vietnamese, Khowar, Kalasha and Latin. We have six more languages lined up. This translation into Sinhalesé is part of project to translate Winnie-the-Pooh into other languages. The idea is children need to learn to read at an early age and the best way to teach them to read is to provide reading materials that they find interesting. Children around the world laugh when they see Winnie-the-Pooh saying and doing silly things. Since Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book world-wide, translating this book into the different languages of the world will be conducive to teaching children to read in those languages.
The real original Winnie-the-Pooh teddy bear is now on display at the New York Public Library Children's Room on 42nd Street at Fifth Avenue.
