I have some lovely books for my child in Welsh, as he attends a Welsh-medium nursery which will lead on to Welsh school. Only downside is that although I am learning, my Welsh isn't up to reading them yet! He's only 4 so he can't read yet either. He wants me to read the books to him and although I can give him a flavour from the pictures and the words that I can understand obviously we are not getting the full benefit from these books.
I'd like to be able to find the English text for the books so that we could read them in English now and Welsh when we are better at it! Does anybody know if this sort of thing is available online? I don't want to get them in English as well, although I might try to get them from the library if I can.
I am currently translating one with the help of google translate, hehe! Obviously this is not ideal as it will only give a general idea but it's better than nothing.
Join in for children's book recommendations.
Children's books
Where to find English Translations of Welsh books?
Frawli · 01/05/2011 22:36
Can't help exactly, but a few thoughts.
Quite a lot of the books dd brought home from school when she was small had a translation in the back - could you ask the school to give you those ones where possible? The school also had story sacks which had a typed translation of the books included.
Often similarly she came home with Welsh versions of well known children's books, so as you suggest by looking in the library I could find the English version (and your library is also likely to have a good selection of bilingual books).
If you can get to the stage of reading Welsh out loud - not too hard as of course it is phonetically regular - then you can read the book to your ds even if you don't understand it, and your ds can tell you what the story means. The only problem that I did find (depending on where you are) is that a lot of books seem to be written in North Walian welsh, so dd didn't necessarily know all the words. But very often we read books together, I did the reading and dd explained the story to me, plus corrected my bad pronunciation! Any bits we got stuck on we just asked the teacher or TA who were very happy to help. Its a good way to learn for you too so long as you don't mind gaining a slightly odd vocabulary 
The only one I can come up with (with the help of the dictionary ) is ywen / yew tree . . . bit obscure though. Maybe post elsewhere where there might be native Welsh speakers with much better ideas!
To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.