Breaking down language barriers and fostering inclusivity through demystifying Mandarin for native English speakers is our main passion. However, we have also set out to make it easier for native Mandarin speakers to maintain their mother-tongue (say, for example, when immigrating from China to North America, etc.) as their child's first or second language. Some of our publications even make it easier for Mandarin speakers to gain a deeper understanding of English because many of them, such as our storybooks, are “reversible” thanks to our proprietary Text Scaffolding system (see the question about that below), meaning they can be read “in either direction”, ie. with a focus on just the English or just the Mandarin, as needed. Our products are intended primarily for children but are created with learners of any age in mind. So, teens and adults can use them to supplement their own studies.

In 2020 we became Little Crab Educational Press, LCEP for short.

In Mandarin, the company name is 小螃蟹教育出版社, which, in Pinyin is: Xiǎo Páng Xiè Jiào Yù Chū Bǎn Shè. 

The “Little” is a nod to our flagship book Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任. (Most existing copies of the first edition of Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任 from 2015 to 2019 bear the company name Little Crab Edutainment.) As for "Crab", in Chinese culture the crab symbolizes the prosperity and status that would result from high achievement in education (specifically, achieving the highest ranking in the Chinese Imperial Exams which were administered from the Song dynasty up until they were discontinued in 1905).

The crab imagery also provides the opportunity for an “Easter egg” that kids can find throughout the flagship series, Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任. Keep an eye out for Sandy the Crab, who makes an appearance back in the real world, on the last page of the Little Byron - Xiǎo Bái Rèn - 小白任 story. Sandy will also pop up in the illustrations of subsequent books in that series!

The text in our children's stories appears in a format developed exclusively by LCEP called Text Scaffolding, or, Scaffolded Text, which shows relationships between:

- Simplified Chinese characters: jiǎnhuàzì = 简化字, also known as jiǎntǐzì = 简体字, at the top. (as opposed to Traditional Chinese characters: zhèngtǐzì = 正体字, also known as fántǐzì = 繁体字)
- Pinyin = Pīnyīn = 拼音 (meaning: to spell sound), in the middle, and 
- English words = Yīngyǔ dāncí = 英语单词, at the bottom

The following figures show how Text Scaffolding aligns the words depending on certain grammatical situations:

Figure 1:

 

When specific vocabulary words do not translate perfectly/directly but the sentence overall keeps word order the same, the words that have no match in the other language are given their own space. In Figure 2's example, the grammatical word order is the same: the English sentence is a Subject-Verb-Object construction and so is the Chinese. English speakers would say "I am (NAME)" to introduce themselves, using the "be" verb am. But in the Chinese line, the verb jiào = 叫 literally translates to "to be called". So, while the literal translation of the Chinese would be "I am called Byron", it is acceptable to consider it the same as saying "I am Byron".

Figure 3:

When the sentence structure and/or individual word translations differ too greatly between the languages to line them up smoothly, the lines of Chinese and Pinyin text are instead horizontally offset from the corresponding English line and are colour-coded to show which words in both languages relate to one another.

The video👇 illustrates these descriptions with additional visuals and is narrated to assist you in understanding the system. Before you watch the video itself, this is a quick intro explaining how the concept of Text Scaffolding (or Scaffolded Text) came to be in the first place:

Video Introduction for Mandarin Speakers

我很高兴给你们介绍:“Little Byron – 小白任”！这是我自己写的一本双语书。也许你会想，“她为什么写小孩子的中英文书啊？”其实， 我有许多原因， 最重要的是我不想丢掉我的中文。 我还是学生学中文的时候，很遗憾没有很多现代和有意思的阅读材料，所以我决定用我的知识, 创作我自己的好玩儿的资料。我觉得很多的父母想教他们的孩子讲英文或者中文，可是他们发现很多的双语书有许多的缺点。比如， 有些书有英文和汉字， 但是没有拼音。 有些书有汉字和拼音却没有英文。 而且，大多数的双语故事把一种语言放在页面的右边而把地二种语言放在页面的左边， 让看书的人很容易只看一种语言而忽略另外一种语言。 请大家欣赏我的视频了解我如何处理这个问题！ 谢谢你们！

The above video introduction translated from Mandarin into English:

I am very happy to introduce to you: Little Byron - 小白任! This is a bilingual book written by me. You may think, "Why did she write a child's Chinese and English book?" Actually, I have many reasons; the most important thing is that I don't want to lose my Chinese. When I was a student studying Chinese, I regretted that there weren’t many modern and interesting reading materials out there, so I decided to use my knowledge and create my own interesting materials. I think many parents want to teach their children to speak English or Chinese, but they find that many bilingual books have many shortcomings. For example, some books have English and Chinese characters, but no Pinyin. Some books have Chinese characters and Pinyin, but no English. Moreover, most bilingual stories put one language on the right side of the page and the second language on the left side of the page, making it easy for readers to read only one language and ignore the other. Please enjoy my video to learn how I deal with this problem! Thank you all!