It’s happened! We did it! Buddy’s Pancakes has been translated into Tamil!
A version of Buddy’s Pancakes now exists where Buddy is now Pattu and pancakes are now dosas.
When our son was born we eagerly scoured online shops for our favourite picture books in English AND Tamil so that we could read the book in both languages. As a bi-lingual family, or technically tri-lingual because Sheju’s original language is Malayalam (a palindrome for all you word-lovers), we wanted to have the resources to back up our children’s first explorations into learning two very different languages.
Strangely there weren’t many there. We opted for Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Bill Martin Junior and Eric Carle. It’s a beautiful book and Eddie LOVED it. But there weren’t that many others out there – I just had another quick look today (four years later) and still… hardly any. That’s pretty strange seeing as there are 1.5 billion English speakers and 77 million Tamil speakers worldwide. And I couldn’t find even one with people of colour or diverse characters in…
So maybe Pattu’s Dosa is the first!
We would like to give many thanks to S. Meena Kumari for the wonderful translation.
