A rhino’s birthday, told in two languages: making “Nosorog i mravi”
Svjetlana Stojanović’s rhymed picture book about a worried rhino and the ants who save his birthday — produced by us as two parallel editions, Serbian and Russian, from one set of illustrations.
Some books you simply enjoy making. “Nosorog i mravi” — in full, “Носорог и мрави. Журкица у трави.” by Svjetlana Stojanović — was one of those. It’s a rhymed picture book about Mile, a thoroughly real rhinoceros whose birthday is tomorrow, and who has just realised, with some alarm, that a rhino can’t exactly bake his own cake or work out where the candle goes. Luckily he has friends — and the smallest of them, a colony of ants, turn out to matter most.
A birthday story about friendship
The whole book runs in verse, the kind written to be read aloud at bedtime, and it lands on a gentle idea: the friends who save your party aren’t always the biggest ones. The Russian edition puts it right in the subtitle — a tale about true friendship.
Made in two languages at once
What made this one special on our desk is that we produced it as two parallel editions, Serbian and Russian, from a single set of illustrations. Rhyme never translates line-for-line, so we re-fitted the verse spread by spread — adjusting type size and spacing in each language — until both editions sat happily on the very same pictures. Then we prepared the files for press and printed it.
If you’d like the full production story — the bilingual layout, the prepress and the print run, step by step — we wrote it up as a case study.