Disney-comics digest #753.

[deckerd@agcs.com]

> Dr. Erika Fuchs has retired some years ago. She was the regular 
> translator for German publishing of Disney stories, especially Barks' 
> duck stories for which she gained much fame by the German fans.
> But for the German publishing of the Carl Barks Library in color she was 
> asked to retranslate the stories which were translated by others or 
> translate the stories which were never published before in Germany.
> Because of her accept the CBL in German will be a Dr. Erika Fuchs CBL.
> 
> -- Gilbert

Yeah, for German Duck fans, Dr. Erika Fuchs's translations are kind of
the King James Version of Barks stories. She was a teacher, I believe,
who took her pedagogical training seriously, and felt the language
used in comics should be educational as well as entertaining. It's
hard to convey the flavor of her translations in English, but they were
literate, and often used proverbs and literary allusions. Not quite the
slangy, colloquial style Barks wrote, but effective in its own way. For
German fans who grew up on her versions of Barks's stories, they're just
as "official" as the originals. Thus the demand for her work in the 
German edition of the CBL.

I read in a European fanzine that Barks visited Dr. Fuchs when he was
over there last year. She isn't a whole lot younger than he is (late
80s, I think). He took her flowers and the account almost made it sound
like a young man shyly calling on a young lady. 

When I went through Hamburg last year, I picked up a special 60th 
Birthday of Donald Duck album. Besides reprinting Don Rosa's Duck
version of It's a Wonderful Life, the book printed a Barks story that
had never been printed in Germany before (the "Milkman" story that
Western rejected) with a brand new Erika Fuchs translation. That she
had done the translation seemed to be considered one of the selling
points, just under the fact that it was a Barks story never before
seen in that part of the world.

Translators are usually anonymous drudges. At best, a good translator
is completely invisible: if he's doing his job well, you shouldn't
even be aware he's there. At worst, a bad translator can kill a story.
It's nice to see a good translator getting the acclaim she deserves!

--Dwight Decker
>