Keskustelujen arkisto

David wrote:
> >RE: TRANSLATIONS
> >There was a period in the 1950s, at least, when translators did
> seem to translate from non-English languages.
>
And I can confirm that according to the Swedish translator P-AWestrin, who
did the translations at that time together with his wife, they did indeed
get the stories in many various languages, to translate from. (Information
source: an article/interview about Westrin in Swedish fanzine
"NAFS(k)uriren"!.)

/Joakim Gunnarsson.
>

David G.:

> RE: TRANSLATIONS
> There was a period in the 1950s, at least, when translators did seem to translate from non-English languages. I have a set of discarded Egmont master pages from 1957. Danish type has been glued over the original English. Swedish has been glued on top of the Danish and German on top of the Swedish. Given the way that the translations from each country read, it appears that each country translated the story from the previous country's translation!
> This would seem to be a very unwieldy process. But the margarine factory situation seems to be evidence that it's what was indeed done. (So Erika Fuchs did not, I can only suppose, always work from English.)

This is an information which is as interesting as it is irritating ...
It wouldn't surprise me too much if the Danish and Norwegian (and
Swedish) translators exchanged their texts between themselves, as these
languages are close enough to each other. But it's a different thing to
base a German translation on a, say, Danish text.

If my memory does not fail me completely, Erika Fuchs never mentioned
she received texts in a language other than English. Nor have I found a
hint that she does even speak a Scandinavian language. And it is not at
all easy for an average German who never had lessons in that language to
understand a text written in Danish.

So it stays a mystery for now. To me, at least.

Hilsen, Gerd

Hi!

>>
>> He's happy to do it (now, he's completing another story, made by him).
>
> Romano Scarpa told you he's happy to be drawing my story? Great! Next
> time you see him, please tell him *I'm* very happy to have *him* draw my
> story. :-) He truly is a comics legend, isn't he?!

Oh, yes, he is!
I'll do it!

LMuca

In a message dated 7/9/2002 5:10:35 AM Central Standard Time,
dcml-request at stp.ling.uu.se writes:

> Hi.
> I don't know if this topic was dealed with before, but I just found a
> hidden "Barks" in Don Rosa's "The Crocodile Collector" among with the
> hieroglyphs in El Faijum (page 7 panel 5 of that story).
>

If I remember right, there are two hidden Barks in that story.
One obvious one is the Caricature of Barks in the throne room,
the other was the words "Barks was here" barely distinguishable on distant
ruins.
I know the "Barks" is readable but I think the "was here" has been
obliterated.

Sigvald Gr?sfjeld:

> square-eggs (or are they called "cubic-eggs"
> in the US-originals of "Lost in the Andes" and "Return
> to Plain-Awful"?

In both stories, the word "square" has been used specifically.

--Harry.

Joakim Gunnarsson:

>And I can confirm that according to the Swedish translator P-AWestrin, who
>did the translations at that time together with his wife, they did indeed
>get the stories in many various languages, to translate from. (Information
>source: an article/interview about Westrin in Swedish fanzine
>"NAFS(k)uriren"!.)

That's very much correct; I was one of the interviewers. The Westrins
translated "Kalle Anka & C:o" 1957-1981, and they told us that for many
years (I don't know the exact dates), the standard procedure was to receive
ripped-out pages from various foreign Disney magazines to work from:
American, Scandinavian, German, Italian, anything. They could handle most
of it as Mrs. Westrin was a language Ph.D. or something like that. I think
they told us that they only once had to return a Turkish "original". That
language was beyond their abilities.

1948-1957 Axel Norbeck was the Swedish translator. He is deceased since
many years, but last year a colleague and I had the opportunity to visit
his daughter. She was very surprised when we implied that her father might
have worked from Danish originals, for example. As far as she knew,
everything was always American. But I believe there are too many
similarities between the Scandinavian issues that are too far away from the
American text. I cannot surmise otherwise than they all were made from the
same, non-original source even before 1957. However, it was news to me that
wordings like "the margarine factory" appeared in Germany, as well! Very
interesting. (It could also be noted that Norbeck's daughter moved out of
the house as early as 1951, so after that date, she could not have observed
her father's work as closely as before.)

Now, it might be interesting to know if the Danish translation usually was
the first one that all the other countries were given as "original". At
that time, the stories did not always appear simultaneously in all the
Scandinavian countries. For a clue, one might want to check when the skunk
oil/margarine story first appeared in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and even
Germany. If Erika Fuchs didn't read Danish, as Gerd suggests, maybe hers
was the first one that the Scandinavians used later on? Likewise for other
famous examples such as our well-known Scandinavian "Crying Sailor" song,
which is "The Screaming Cowboy" in Barks' original story; and so on.

Stefan Dios
Malmo, Sweden

Hi!

Sigvald:
>>> The United Arabian Emirates have started production of
>>> square melons, tomatoes and cucumbers in order to gain
>>> a more effective use of the space in refrigerators.

Japanese beat them to it; I read about it last year and I think it was mentioned on the list.
I remember also one of magazine "Pif" 's gadgets: a plastic device to make square eggs; you peeled
off the shell and put the egg in the square thing. That was a looooong time ago, in the early to mid
eighties.

Olivier

Stefan D.:

> Now, it might be interesting to know if the Danish translation usually was
> the first one that all the other countries were given as "original". At
> that time, the stories did not always appear simultaneously in all the
> Scandinavian countries. For a clue, one might want to check when the skunk
> oil/margarine story first appeared in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and even
> Germany.

Denmark, Sweden and Germany all published the story in the February,
1955 issue (no information on Norway available in the Inducks database),
so this gives no clue to the origin of the phrase. However, it would be
worth doing more research in that direction. Wish I had more
Scandinavian issues than the couple of Anders Ands I brought with me
from my last vacation in Denmark ...

Gerd