Erika Fuchs, née Petri, (b. 7 December 1906 in Rostock; d. 22 April 2005 in Munich) was a German translator. Erika Fuchs became famous in Germany due to her translations of American Walt Disney cartoons, especially Carl Barks's stories about Duckburg and its inhabitants. Unlike the English originals, the translations included many hidden quotes and literary allusions. As Erika Fuchs once said, "You can't be educated enough to translate comic books". Many of her creations entered the German language, such as the phrase "Dem Ingeniör ist nichts zu schwör" - "nothing is too hard for an engineer", but with the vowels at the end of "Ingenieur" and "schwer" altered to make them rhyme amusingly. She also used verbs shortened to their stem not only to imitate sounds (onomatopoeia), such as schluck, stöhn, knarr (gulp, groan, creak) but also to represent soundless events: grübel, staun (ponder, goggle). The word for these in German is now an "Erikative", named after her. Fuchs's creations are commonly used in Internet forums and chatrooms to describe what people are doing as they write. Fuchs spent most of her childhood and youth in Belgard in Pomerania, where in 1921 she was the first girl to be admitted to the boys' Gymnasium (grammar school) - she passed her Abitur exam there in 1926. She went on to study art history in Lausanne, Munich and London and took her degree in 1931 - 1932. In 1935 her dissertation was entitled "Johann Michael Feichtmayr: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Rokoko" - "a contribution to the history of German Baroque". It received a summa cum laude. After the Second World War she worked as a translator for the German edition of Reader's Digest, before carrying out translating jobs for other American magazines. In 1951 she became chief editor of the newly founded German Micky Maus magazine, where she worked until she retired in 1988. In 2001 she was awarded the Heimito von Doderer Prize for Literature for her work on Duckburg. Until her death at 98, Erika Fuchs was an honorary member of the "D.O.N.A.L.D." ("Deutsche Organisation nichtkommerzieller Anhänger des lauteren Donaldismus" or the "German Organization of Non-commercial Devotees of the true Donaldism") Some members of this organisation (Patrick Bahners and Andreas Platthaus) occasionally sprinkled Fuchsian tidbits amongst the headlines of the serious FAZ newspaper, although these were often recognisable only by those in the know.
References
- This article is based on a translation of the corresponding article from the German Wikipedia, retrieved May 6, 2005.
