The Arabic language is a little unusual – while there are more than 400 million Arabic speakers in the world, most of these speak regional dialects such as, Egyptian, not Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) which is the version taught in schools across the Arabic world, used in newspapers, and so on.
This leads to some problems.
Most books are written in MSA, or Fusha as it also known, the formal version of the Arabic language, which is generally not spoken (except perhaps by politicians), so parents reading a bedtime story to their pre-school child would likely find it written in MSA as opposed to their colloquial language which they speak at home.
Of course, this means that many young children wouldn’t understand the language written in the book!
Parents find that they must translate the story in their head, reading it aloud in the vernacular, which can often slow down the reading process and make for a stilted, affected reading.
However, according to a recent article online in the Middle East Eye, help is now at hand from a group of parents who have taken it upon themselves to translate classic children’s tales such as, Little Red Riding Hood and the Ugly Duckling, and create new tales in the vernacular.
Riham Shendy, 45, started translating popular English-language storybooks into Egyptian Arabic after she had her twins, Ali and Leila, in 2013. An economist by profession and with a PhD in Applied Economics, she was working at the World Bank in Washington DC when she and her German husband, Steffen Reichold, decided to teach their son and daughter their respective mother tongues.
Shendy began by translating books, printing out the translated version and sticking it onto the corresponding page in the book she was reading to her children. She then began sharing them online and they proved hugely popular.
She has now self-published, “Kan Yama Kan” (Once Upon A Time), an anthology of eight popular children’s stories, all in her translation, including classic children’s tales re-written with a colloquial twist.
Shandy’s version of Little Red Riding Hood, gives us Mika (as Red Riding Hood) who carries a fiteer (an Egyptian crepe) instead of a pie, to her grandmother, who lives in the oasis city of Fayoum near Egypt’s only waterfall in Wadi al-Rayyan.
The translated and updated version of the Ugly Duckling by Shandy is set in Sohag, Egypt, where the duck hides among the sugar cane plantations, while in her version of The Three Little Pigs, based in the western desert, the wolf falls into a huge bowl of green molokhia, a jute leaf stew.
Sharing Shandy’s experience of struggling to find suitable reading material for her daughter was Reem Makhoul, a Palestinian journalist living in New York.
Makhoul, along with her husband, has since formed the publishing house, Ossass Stories, to produce stories in spoken Arabic dialects.
They formed the publishing house from scratch, financing it themselves and creating imaginative children’s tales.
In 2015 they published The Girl Who Lost Her Imagination which is set in New York and inspired by their daughter, Sheherazade’s active imagination.
Since this time, the family have moved to Jerusalem where they have published a second book titled Where Shall I Hide? Both books are published in Levantine and Egyptian Arabic.
Saussan Khalil, an Arabic language teacher at the University of Cambridge, is a mother of two who is also familiar with the struggles of teaching the Egyptian language to her children.
After moving to the UK in 2014, when her daughter, Noura, was two and a half years old, she worried that Noura would never fully comprehend the Egyptian language without an extended Egyptian community around them.
To overcome this, Khalil set up a small weekly group with a friend’s and neighbour’s children, conducting the group purely in vernacular Arabic.
She now teaches around 60 people, ranging from young children to adults, using a phonics-based system called Kalamna, meaning ‘our words’.
The scarcity of native-language resources caused Khalil to search further afield where she discovered Makhoul’s Ossass Stories and later spoke to Shendy about how to add her Arabic translations into English storybooks.
From that moment on the three women, based in the UK, US and Middle East, became firm friends, regularly speaking via email and social media.
They finally met up, in person, in 2019 at Hyde Park and this meeting was the impetus Shendy needed to make the decision to publish her own anthology of children’s tales.
“Kan Yama Kan” (Once Upon a Time) the anthology of international folktales retold in Egyptian Arabic, is published by Tuta-Tuta.com and is a must for anyone who would like to read to their children in Egyptian Arabic.
“The Girl who Lost Her Imagination” and “Where Shall I Hide?”, are available from Ossass Stories in both Levantine and Egyptian Arabic editions.
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