Many Europeans are welcoming children and adults leaving Ukraine to find safety in the EU. To help them communicate, at home, at school, in reception facilities, or wherever contacts may take place, the Publications Office of the European Union has produced a practical bilingual pictogram booklet, aimed at helping Ukrainian children (and adults) and people in the host country to communicate. The booklet is available in a digital format, in all 24 official EU languages.
Facing communication challenges? Use pictograms
The publication uses pictograms and short expressions, grouped by theme, to express everyday needs and desires. The original concept came from the Polish therapist Weronika Firlejczyk, and builds on pictograms created by the Aragonese Center of Augmentative and Alternative Communication (Spain). The idea for the booklet came from colleagues, who in March prepared the booklet for a visit by Commissioner Mariya Gabriel to a school in Brussels and was well received by both children and teachers.
On the EU Publications portal, the booklet has become a real hit, recording thousands of downloads from all around the EU.
Ukrainian language resources in one place – join the community and help us to build a rich repository
Inspired by this initiative and responding to the need for more bilingual resources in Ukrainian and EU languages, SCIC’s KCI team, together with a group of colleagues from the Publications Office of the EU decided to create a community of practice for language professionals willing to contribute in the following ways:
- By expanding the booklet with new topics/content, additional features (e.g. transliteration or pronunciation), or languages;
- By sharing with the community other useful bilingual materials and books that can be translated into other EU languages via crowdsourcing;
- By assembling in one place vocabularies, official terms and other useful language resources in Ukrainian.
You can also contribute! Join the community of practice set up on the KCI for the crowdsourcing of translations and further additions to the booklet and, possibly, the creation of other similar projects.