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Thursday 9 March 2006

Parsonage Guide in Chinese

















Chinese visitors to the Parsonage in Haworth can now "read all about it" quite literally with the publication of a Museum guide translated into Chinese by bilingual University of Leeds students.


The guides, already published in 9 different languages, are increasingly in demand by overseas visitors who make up around 20% of the overall visitor figures at the Museum. Plans are underway to introduce a broader range of translated guides to include Russian, Arabic and Polish versions.


Alan Bentley, the Director of the Brontë Parsonage Museum said, "We are receiving ever increasing numbers of visitors from China and Eastern Europe and we feel it is important to respond to the demand for information in visitors' native languages. The production of the guides by University of Leeds students will go a long way to ensuring our visitors receive the information that they need, in a format they can understand".


With foreign school children, tourists and intellectuals all eager to see the home of one of the most famous literary families in the world, the guides are a welcome resource to assist foreign travellers in their quest for in-depth knowledge about the Brontë family, their surroundings and conditions in Haworth in the Nineteenth Century.


A Chinese film crew recently spent days filming in and around the Parsonage to give the Chinese people a flavour of the home and surrounding countryside where the Brontës lived. The results will be included in a 100-part TV series to be broadcast in China in December 2006. The crew have spent 5 years filming the documentary which is entitled A History of the World.



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