Carol Sakoian’s typical workday involves securing approvals from Middle Eastern officials to deliver goods funded by the U.S. State Department and produced by an American corporate giant. Luckily for her, the subject matter of her imports is, um, a bit more elementary than that of most foreign-policy materials.

“We needed to lengthen the skirts within the illustrations for Heidi,” she recalls. “And in one book, the word ladybug tortured me. The translation was masculine in one country and feminine in another.” Then there was the task of giving the children on Ms. Frizzle’s Magic School Bus traditional Arabic names.

A vice president at publisher Scholastic International, Sakoian runs My Arabic Library, which translates the text and adapts the pictures of classic American children’s books for Arabic-speaking children. As of this December, the program will have placed more than 7 million books in Middle Eastern schools.

Sakoian’s job is to facilitate such adaptations, and since last fall, she’s been on a nonstop tour of the program’s participating countries, which include Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and Morocco.

She shrugs off portrayals of the Middle East as a uniquely perilous destination: “I believe now you can end up in the wrong place at the wrong time anywhere—New York, London, Madrid.” She can’t say enough about the graciousness of the region’s people, in or out of the boardroom. Still, when she travels in the area, the most important thing she brings with her is a heightened sense of self-awareness.

Sakoian always wears modest pantsuits and, in Saudi Arabia, dons a hijab (head covering). She chooses hotels that have a solid security staff. “As a woman traveling alone, I don’t need any late-night phone calls or knocks on the door, and I want to be able to call a manager if I feel uncomfortable,” she says. And she’s careful not to walk alone at night, an action that “invites remarks and sounds from men I don’t totally understand, but I get the message.”

Hazards aside, Sakoian loves the Middle East. Before joining Scholastic, she circled the globe as an oil-acquisitions executive for Conoco. Travel was also an integral part of her childhood. “My father was a Pan Am pilot for many years, so I have a long history with this part of the world. When I was about 15, we went to Beirut. It was the dream place, the place we all loved, the Paris of the Middle East.”

Now her trips revolve around hammering out translations of Penguins Swim but Don’t Get Wet and a biography of Amelia Earhart. “We started off with professional translators, and they made the books sound like a legal text,” Sakoian says. “So we taught teachers, who knew the first-grade language better than anyone, to be editors.”

It often takes several drafts for each country’s ministry of education to approve a book. “They send [manuscripts] back with comments and suggestions, and we have our editorial team on the phone negotiating instantly,” says Sakoian. “Very often there’s debate. We try to come out with the best common denominator.” And, of course, a happy ending.