Workforce Language Services

On Sesame Street, neighbors work their problems out with smiles under cloudless skies. Kids learn the letters of the alphabet and sing songs, and in the tradition of the 40+ year old TV show, they learn that their world is diverse—and that’s okay.

The question, then, is how to bring these same messages to a world divided, where neighbors do not work out their problems with smiles, much less in the same neighborhood: Israel and Palestine. We post this great NYTimes Magazine article (although published last year) here as a very interesting read as well as a case study for localization in a controversial environment.

This season’s episodes of “Shara’a Simsim,” the Palestinian version of the global “Sesame Street” franchise, were filmed in a satellite campus of Al-Quds University, a ramshackle four-story concrete structure that houses the school’s media department and a small local television station. The building sits in an upscale neighborhood on the outskirts of the West Bank city of Ramallah, not far from the edge of the Israeli settlement Psagot. Like many structures on the West Bank, the Al-Quds building seems to be simultaneously under construction and decaying into a ruin. Some walls are pocked with bullet holes, from when the Israeli Army occupied the building for 19 days in 2001, during the second intifada. In another life, the building was a hotel, and the balconies out front where TV crews and students take smoking breaks overlook the crumbling shell of its swimming pool.

Read on…