Beagle Boys in Translation

[Dwight Decker]

Since Don Rosa and others have been discussing the Beagle Boys
of late, I thought I'd add something I ran into recently. I'm
a freelance translator and Gladstone occasionally sends me
European-produced Disney stories to render into English. One
story was a Dutch tale that had the 16th Century lookalike
ancestors of Donald, HD&L, and Scrooge pitted against the 
16th Century ditto of the Beagle Boys. And this was a DUTCH
story: costumes, settings, and ship designs were all straight
out of 16th Century Holland. There was no way to pretend this
was taking place in England. So I went with the Dutch background,
assuming that if Donald could have Scottish ancestors, he could
easily have Dutch ones as well. So Scrooge became Pinchpenny
van Dukke, etc. The Beagle Boys had an archaic spelling of their
Dutch name, so I called them the "Van Biegel Lads." How much of
all this will survive the editor's judgment, I have no idea;
we'll find out when Gladstone publishes the story sometime next
year.

--Dwight Decker
(just a Mickey Mouse translator)