Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book in the world. Turkish is a language read and spoken by two hundred million people worldwide.
Characteristic features of Turkish, such as vowel harmony, agglutination, and lack of grammatical gender are universal within the Turkic family. There is a high degree of mutual intelligibility among the various Oghuz languages, which include Turkish, Azerbaijani, Turkmen, Qashqai, Gagauz, Balkan Gagauz Turkish, and Oghuz-influenced Crimean Tatar. Turkish has been regarded as a perfectly phonemic language where every sound is represented by exactly one letter in the alphabet. It has been proposed as the World Language because of its profection of the Phonemic system.
Ishi Press has reprinted translations of Winnie-the-Pooh into 29 languages thus far. We have published it in Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Turkish, Yiddish, Hindi, Urdu, Khowar, Kalasha and Latin. We have six more languages lined up, including Japanese and Latvian. This translation into Turkish 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.
We are not translating the entire book. We are only translating Chapter 2, which is the most interesting, most popular and shortest chapter.
We would like to hope that this little bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, can bring peace and unity to the language of the region.
