Hello! Our govt partner has decided to require all the Bloom books to be bilingual for printing and sharing on Bloom library. It is exciting that they want to use L1 more in education, but it is creating a real challenge for book layout that is pleasing, easy to navigate, and not too complicated for local Bloomers.
In order to “obey” our levels and other guidelines, we are having trouble getting everything onto pages and then also doing this in 7 national languages. All books are now twice as long, nicely laid-out with the L1 in the beginning of the book and national language in the second half of the book. This is easier for the local Bloomers, but will be REALLY expensive to print and will make less copies available. Something like this question might be helpful. We can develop the book in national language, use it as a source, and then add the L1 section to the same book. It is hard to lay out both sections separately. The book is long!
I would love to find others who have explored this more than I have! I have done lots of Blooming for Little Zebra Books bookshelf and am familiar with Enterprise, etc.
They also want to do A6 books BILINGUALLY for longer stories and I am struggling with the layouts. I do not like the automatic two language layout in Bloom where the text box splits. Even if you set L1 and L2 to different styes like using italic for one, it isn’t “equal” enough and for fluent reading in any of the languages, there is a challenge. I prefer top of page to be L1 and bottom of page L2.
Here is a sample of a level 3 book in A6 size. AND they wanted to limit the number of pages!
Comments and help appreciated. Thanks!
Hi Jeni
We’re doing bilingual books in Madagascar. Two text boxes on each page with L1 in top using one style and L2 in bottom using a different style. Some pages also have an illustration in the middle. I’m really busy now (back in Namibia) but may be able to offer help though there’s not much more to say. Chris D
Size of page?
Size of text?
Paragraph or sentence/word per page?
Size of illustration?
Number of pages?
What age/reading level?
Will you be at the global gathering?
I do not like the automatic two language layout in Bloom where the text box splits. Even if you set L1 and L2 to different styes like using italic for one, it isn’t “equal” enough and for fluent reading in any of the languages, there is a challenge. I prefer top of page to be L1 and bottom of page L2.
Hey Jeni – based on the above, I think you are already aware of Bloom’s language control for text boxes, but for the sake of others who may be reading this article, I want to bring this lesser-known feature to this important discussion.
To access this feature:
- Enable Change Layout
- Click gear icon in the text box.
- Choose which language to show.
With this control, you could arrange, for example, English to be at the top of the page, and French to be at the bottom:
Thank you for pointing that out, Colin.
YES! That is exactly what I do. I set up some template pages that fit what I need for L1 and L2.
My trouble is that if there is quite a bit of text on the pages, it will not fit with the image in the middle in an A5 size book. My client also asked for A6 sizes that would make this even more difficult. They want everything all at once. 
This looks very nice and I am happy with this. Once we have a whole paragraph we run into a little more trouble if we use bigger than 14pt font.
I just wanted to know if there were others working with this formatting.
We have also done left page text in L1 and L2 and right page image.
Jeni
