First Yiddish translation is online

Our first translation into Yiddish is online on www.bilingual-picturebooks.org: The Ant Library. The story of an underground library for ants was created in a workshop with a group of children, which was hosted by our Yiddish translator and proofreader Sandra.

We asked Sandra about her favourite words and peculiarities of the Yiddish language and of course we don't want to withhold her fascinating answer from you:

"[The word] ... is בעהאַלטעניש /behaltenish and means hiding place. As with many words in Yiddish, they are very similar to German, but have a slightly different meaning, e.g. 'shlepn' means 'to pull' and 'iberlegung' is 'the experience'. Another favourite word of mine is 'Likhtikayt', again you can guess the meaning: Brightness. 

Yiddish is like a sister to German, but also has components from Hebrew, Slavic, even Latin and French, and unfortunately it is in danger of extinction!

What I find particularly exciting when translating is how the very foreign - the Hebrew letters - suddenly become very familiar words. It's like a magical transformation, or digging up treasures, and it's great fun for me."