The stories we encounter as children help us to shape our understanding of the world. They help us to formulate questions, to grapple with challenges, to understand that everybody is different – and everybody is the same. The stories we discover when we are young have a special capacity to explain and to reassure. That we often form enduring bonds with the books we discover in childhood is hardly a surprise.

For me it was Asterix and The Little Prince, Joan Aiken and the Moomins, fairytales and Maurice Sendak, Susan Cooper and Tintin and, of course, Roald Dahl. A pretty standard diet for a British child in the 1980s, I think. I loved them all, I read and reread them; they were the worlds I most willingly lived in when I wasn’t in this one.

Do you notice anything curious about that list?

Asterix and The Little Prince are French, set respectively 2,000 years ago and in the Sahara desert/on an asteroid. Joan Aiken’s books are English, albeit largely about an England that never existed. The Moomins are Finnish, but Swedish speaking. All of my favourite fairytales came from France, Denmark and Germany. Sendak was American (although his parents were Polish), while Susan Cooper has long lived in the US, but is from Buckinghamshire; Tintin is a French-speaking Belgian and Dahl was Welsh-Norwegian. In other words, the stories I read, in English, in London, had mostly travelled great distances to reach me. I’m not sure I knew this as a kid. I certainly didn’t care.

Why might we find that odd? Surely is it normal?

You’d be surprised. There is a fair bit of children’s literary traffic around the Anglosphere – we readily read American children’s books, and they ours. But we resist the rest of the world, as if the 90-something per cent of people who don’t principally speak English have no stories to tell us. Just think what we’re missing! Think about all of the stories, the bestsellers, the award-winning books from throughout the world that children here would devour, given a chance. Think about the opportunities their characters might provide to help young readers build empathy with children from different cultures and backgrounds (an antidote to all those border-tighteners and wall-builders who are so very loud in our current political world).

It should be a no-brainer, but as a translator into English who has a particular interest in books for children I can vouch for the slim pickings. How many contemporary children’s writers whose work is widely translated into English can you name? How many apart from Cornelia Funke?

Publishing international books in the UK has typically been a hard sell, but it more than merits the effort. Which is why I have been working with BookTrust to launch In Other Words, the latest in a series of projects to promote the translation of more children’s books into English. We’re asking international publishers to propose books that deserve English-language publication, and a few of their suggestions will be selected for BookTrust support.

I am constantly surprised that we still need such schemes. We still seem to put translated books in a different category from those written in English. As if the likes of Asterix and Pippi Longstocking must be unappealing, obscure, highbrow or challenging because they are translated from other languages. Yes, Asterix’s world of 50BC Gaul was alien to me and my friends – but was it any more alien than Wonderland, or Neverland, or Narnia?

We always say that stories from other places can map directly on to our own stories, but we also say that we should be less insular, more ready to read tales from distant places because they will give us new perspectives. Maybe both things are true. Stories show us places and lives that are circumstantially not like ours, but the things we have in common – the fears, the loves, a desire to laugh, the extraordinary power of imaginative sympathy, the gift of language – make us able to consume them, wherever their origins. Exploring the specific teaches us the universal.

Regardless of where they come from, stories really do travel easily. And good stories will beget more good stories. A 19th-century Danish tale can enrich our childhoods and can nourish our own writers. Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen was translated to English, and saw a successor in CS Lewis’s White Witch. Half a century later, we see her again in David Almond’s Kit’s Wilderness. Such stories take hold of a creative imagination and do not let it go. Let it go … Oh yes, she’s Elsa in Frozen, too.

The more we can do to allow imaginative stories to travel, and to celebrate the great diversity of their origins, the better. Younger readers have interests and enthusiasms that are unrestrained and unconstrained; their stories are – should be – unconstrained, too. With any luck, In Other Words will help nudge open those borders a little, offering us and our children a few delightful glimpses of what we’ve been missing all this time.

• Submissions for BookTrust’s In Other Words children’s literature in translation project are now open.