The margarine mystery

Gerd Syllwasschy gsy at megatel.de
Tue Jul 9 16:39:05 CEST 2002


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



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