Randomly discovered something interesting earlier today about the Swedish comic 91:an Karlsson.
To give a very brief summary, it's about a young conscripted country boy named Mandel Karlsson and his regiment's misadventures while stationed in a fictional* town called Klackamo. It was first published in 1932, and grew so popular that new strips have been published in its own magazine for decades; it has also gotten translated to Danish + Finnish and inspired a Norwegian comic called 91:an Stomperud.
Anyway, I wanted to see if 91:an ever got released outside Scandinavia -- and it turns out that one single volume was translated to Chinese in 1994! Specifically the 60th anniversary volume that had been published 2 years prior:
I don't know Chinese at all but am kind of tempted to hunt down a copy anyway just to see what changes were made in translation. For instance, I found a wiki claiming that the translated version is 12 pages shorter; it would be interesting to see if content was cut or if it actually has to do with formatting (the same source also said the translated version was "in a smaller format", so...).
Managed to get a copy of that one Dutch volume of 91:an earlier this week! (Note: despite the big "1" on the cover I haven't found any hints of any further volumes getting released)
Unfortunately I don't have access to a scanner right now, so sorry for the shoddy phone photos. Anyway, while I can't analyse the translation on a word-for-word level (both because I'm not exactly good at Dutch and because I'd need the original Swedish strips for comparison), it seems well-made - though I do have some questions.
First off, the one thing I'd really criticise is the lack of any introduction to the series. The back cover simply lists all of the comics that had been published in Dutch by the companies Dendros and Arboris at the time, and characters' names (even some characters that weren't in any of the translated strips!) are shown through illustrations on the cover's insides...
... And then you just get 25 single-page strips without any further introduction or context. The translated strips are simple one-off gags so the lack of introduction isn't really an issue, but I think it would have been nice if the back cover at least explained a bit of the strip's history in Sweden to potential Dutch buyers who weren't familiar with the series.
As for the characters' names... Out of the localised last names, Major Morgonkröök -> Berenburg is probably my favourite, even if it's slightly on-the-nose to name the resident alcoholic after a strong drink (especially if that trait doesn't come into play in the strips they chose to translate).
However, it's a bit surprising that they changed 87 Axelsson's last name to "de Vries", only to leave 91 Karlsson's name alone (their first names have been omitted entirely). Did some quick searching and while it seems like there are more people called Karlsson in the Netherlands than Axelsson, neither of those last names are exactly common there... So I'm curious about why they decided to only localise one of their names.
On a completely different note, it's kind of funny to see that Dutch also has the expression "stenrik(/stenrijk)", meaning that at least one pun made it through translation without any changes. (The closest you'd get to the exchange below in English is probably "Wow! Now we're filthy rich!" "Or at least filthy!")
Overall reading this was pretty interesting, and it's a shame that they probably didn't get to translate more than this... Would have been fun to see how they handled the more modern strips (or maybe some of Petersson's!)
This is how I work to try to put together a face of the below dude (91:an, Furir Revär). Identify the shape of the face, the shape of the cheeks, and the shape of the nose. Identify lines going from the corners of the eyes down to the corners of the mouth.
And yes, that is indeed Ah-nold.
You can find similar pictures like this on my Patreon. Right now, I’m uploading the creation of the 2x9 boys.
(Then I discovered that I missed an important step, ie comparing it to bland specific ethnicity face 101 and noting differences... Time to redo from scratch.)
This is 91:an, one of our oldest Swedish comics. It started in the 1940′s and is a conscription comedy about the small blond dude, who is a Smålandian farmboy with more heart than brains.
This one episode is called ‘in Love and War’. The first lines are 91:an/Mandel telling his superior “Hands up ...Darling!” And it gets gayer from there.
Nu är Olles hörna uppdaterad med en handfull nya texter. Några av texterna är tidigare publicerade i Dagens Nyheter (Namn och nytt, 2021), medan ett par av dem är rykande färska, om än James Fenimore Cooper och Tarzan inte är lika färska.
