WickWick bilingual editions target 200-book catalog by 2026
The Helsinki publisher has issued The Healer Cat in 101 languages and is scaling human-translated bilingual books through its own network.
By Maya Lindqvist · Senior Technology Correspondent
3 min read
WickWick is turning a 101-language children’s book program into a larger run of bilingual editions, a move that shows how a small publisher can expand internationally without selling foreign rights title by title. The Helsinki-based company has 115 WickWick bilingual editions in print across six books and expects at least 200 by the end of 2026.
The center of the program is The Healer Cat, a picture book by Dr. Tuula Pere, WickWick’s co-founder. The book is already available in 101 single-language editions, including English, and the publisher says those languages cover the mother tongues of more than 95% of the world’s children.
WickWick has published 33 English-paired bilingual editions of The Healer Cat. Another 67 are in production and are expected by the end of 2026.
What are WickWick bilingual editions?
A bilingual edition puts two languages in one book, pairing an original text with a translation. In WickWick’s program, English, Finnish and Swedish are being used as anchor languages that can be paired with many other languages.
The publisher’s current bilingual list spans six titles: The Healer Cat, Scared to Swim, Dread in the Dark, Friends and Rivals, Traveling Companions and The Only Crow. Of the 115 editions now in print, 76 pair English with another language and 39 pair Finnish with another language.
The business model differs from the usual small-publisher route of licensing foreign rights to local houses. WickWick publishes the books itself using a network of more than 200 freelance translators that it has built since 2010, and it says each edition is translated by a person rather than by machine translation.
That choice has shaped the pace of the catalog. Pekka Pere, WickWick’s chief executive and co-founder, said the company chose to build its own publishing infrastructure instead of waiting for rights deals, adding that human translation took 15 years to reach the current scale.
Why the production costs matter
The publisher says the expensive step is the first bilingual edition of a title, because the book design has to be rebuilt to hold two languages. After that, each added language pair costs about one-tenth as much as the first, since the existing layout can be reused.
That explains why WickWick describes production, rather than translation, as the constraint on the 2026 schedule. The translations needed for the planned editions are already complete, while the remaining work involves inserting languages into finished bilingual layouts.
By the end of 2026, the company expects at least 100 English-paired editions of The Healer Cat, more than 50 Finnish-paired editions and more than 50 Swedish-paired editions, plus further English-paired editions of Friends and Rivals and other titles as capacity allows. German, Arabic and Persian are also under consideration as future anchor languages.
The program sits in a wider children’s-language access market serving immigrant and diaspora families, language learners and international schools. WickWick presents its catalog at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair and the Frankfurt Book Fair, where publishers and rights buyers typically scout children’s lists for translation and distribution opportunities.
Pere’s wider catalog includes more than 80 original English-language children’s titles, including the Colin the Crab and Axel and Ava early reader series and the War and Peace picture books. The company’s bilingual children’s books from Helsinki are built from that original catalog and its translator network, rather than from separate local publishing contracts.