Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

Translating humor often requires a license with the source material that isn’t present in adventure or technical translations - a perfect example would be Asterix and Obelix, where so many of the names are puns that have to be translated- do you preserve the literal meaning and lose the joke or do you preserve the joke and lose the literal meaning?


Sure, but Fuchs sometimes went to far. Nothing in the original should have triggered her to make Donald and Daisy cousins, who were dating after all. Relocating Duckburg, California, to Entenhausen, somewhere in Germany, also made things pretty awkward. I remember a picture of a map showing some kind of grand tour around towns spread over the entire continental USA. In Fuch's translation this turned into a few villages around some local hill in her neighborhood... You need to change quite a lot to cover up such a decision, but it will never be very convincing. :)


Those are notable issues (though if you take Barks as canon Duckburg is intentionally in Calisota - basically Northern California but fictionalized; and it could make sense to try to 'localize that' for an audience elsewhere; especially when they're just "comics" - Don Rosa's detailed Life and Times would likely garner more respect) - but also note that if you step outside the Barks canon the stories get varied and wild, and are inconsistent amongst themselves. It's one of the surprising things about Don Rosa's work - not that he wrote it but that he COULD write it; Barks was internally consistent without apparently trying.

Lots of these things are caused by the Disney "rules" at the time - no human characters for example (everyone "human" is technically a dog), and there may have been additional rules about "real places" - though enough adventures involved GOING to real cities and locations.

Depending on which story you started with I could easily see the misunderstanding - the "three nephews" refer to Donald as "Uncle Donald" and to Daisy as "Aunt Daisy" at times - but if Donald and Daisy aren't married the way to make that work is to make them cousins. And then you get a second story to translate where it's clear they're dating, and you are now kind of stuck.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: