#Usborne quicklinks german series

So then of course it made sense to learn Dutch… After around five years, I moved to a position in the editorial department, and although I’ve done a lot of work on the The Usborne Reading Programme and Very First Reading in particular, the language titles do keep coming up.Īt the moment, we’re updating one of Usborne’s best-known and best-loved books, the First Thousand Words, which we publish in thirteen languages ourselves, and which has been translated by our partner publishers overseas into over sixty others. I started working in the Foreign Editions department when it was a much smaller operation, just a team of five working on small print-runs of French, Italian and Dutch editions – we hadn’t started doing Spanish, Portuguese or German editions yet. I worked for a travel company, too, between France, Spain and Italy – my dealing-with-grumpy-hotel-staff French, Spanish and Italian got pretty good, as well as my map-reading! In between tours, I was living in the West Highlands (it made sense at the time) and working as a translator when I read an advert for a Production Editorial Assistant, with language skills, for a company called Usborne. After that, I taught English for a while in Barcelona, and picked up Spanish (which I still remember pretty well) and Catalan (which is a bit more of a challenge). We did French, Latin and German, and I then studied French and Italian at university – which included an amazing year in Siena, Italy.

'I started learning languages at school, aged 11, which is considered pretty late these days.

#Usborne quicklinks german series

The First Thousand Words series has now been translated into over 60 languages, from French and German, to Hebrew and even Latin! Today, Mairi Mackinnon, Managing Editor of the series, tells us about her love of languages and editing these books: We’re particularly excited to be re-issuing the original ‘Find the Duck’ book - The Usborne First Thousand Words in English, featuring the much-loved illustrations of Stephen Cartwright: As part of the celebrations for our 40th anniversary this year, we’re publishing special anniversary editions of some of our bestselling titles from over the years.