Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book in the world. French is a language read and spoken by more than two hundred million people. French was estimated to have 77 to 110 million native speakers and millions of secondary speakers. Approximately 274 million people are able to speak the language.
The bulk of the world's French-speaking population lives in Africa. According to the 2007 report by the Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie, an estimated 115 million African people spread across 31 Francophone countries can speak French as a first or a second language. Total users in all countries is 229,582,200.
The name for Winnie-the-Pooh in this edition is Plic-en-Peluche or Plic for short. The Rabbit is Coco Lapin. Christopher Robin is Jean-Christophe.
The purpose of this book is to help French speakers learn English and to help English speakers learn French. To have a translation as close as possible to the original is the most useful. Ishi Press has reprinted translations of Winnie-the-Pooh into 25 languages thus far. We have published it in Armenian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Chinese, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Korean, Persian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Yiddish, Hindi, Urdu, Khowar, Kalasha and Latin. We have six more languages lined up. This translation into French is part of project to translate Winnie-the-Pooh into other languages. The idea is children need to learn to read at an early age and the best way to teach them to read is to provide reading materials that they find interesting. Children around the world laugh when they see Winnie-the-Pooh saying and doing silly things. Since Winnie-the-Pooh is the most popular children's book world-wide, translating this book into the different languages of the world will be conducive to teaching children to read in those languages.