Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book in the world. Albanian is a language read and spoken by seven million people. Albanian is the official language of Albania and Kosovo and is spoken fluently by the majority of the countries' populations. Albanian is a recognized minority language in Croatia, Italy, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania and in Serbia. Albanian is the second most spoken language in Greece (Arvanitika and Cham), Macedonia and the third most spoken language in Italy.
The purpose of this book is to help Albanian speakers learn English and to help English speakers learn Albanian. To have a translation as close as possible to the original is the most useful. The name for Winnie-the-Pooh in Albanian is Uini Pu or Pu for short. The Rabbit is Lepurushi. Christopher Robin is Kristoft Robin. Ishi Press has reprinted translations of Winnie-the-Pooh into 35 languages thus far. We have published it in Afrikaans, Albanian, Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Cebuano, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Yiddish, Hindi, Urdu, Khowar, Kalasha and Latin. We have six more languages lined up. This translation into Albanian 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.
