DAGOBERT DUCK ET AL.

September 11, 2003 by 20 Comments

A Wikipedia entry gives the names of Disney characters in various languages. I find it very odd that Minnie Mouse in Swedish is Mimmi Pigg, but I’m glad to know it. Will someone out there who knows the Russian versions please add them? Just click on “Edit this page” at the bottom. And please include transliterations. (Via Transblawg.)

Comments

  1. opie says
    September 11, 2003 at 5:30 pm

    Pigg means chipper, lively, alert. Mickey is called Musse Pigg, more or less “Mousey Chipper”.

  2. Justin says
    September 12, 2003 at 12:39 am

    Oooh, I have Latin versions from the ELI around here somewhere. I should track those down and contribute them.

  3. Oleg says
    September 12, 2003 at 4:22 pm

    In Russian versions the names are just transliterations of the original names. Mickey Mouse becomes “Mikki Maus”, “Scroodge McDuck” becomes “Scrudzh Mak-Dak” and so forth. At least that’s how it was when Ilast saw them (a few years ago)
    The “Winnie The Poo” cartoons are somewhat exceptional in this aspect for there was an existing extremely well-known translation of the story (by Boris Zakhoder). The character names have been taken from there, so Piglet became Pyatachok, Eeyore turned into Ia-Ia and Tigger got to be called Tigra. Winnie the Pooh himself is still simply Vinni-Pukh. There’s not much you can do about this character’s name, can you? 🙂

  4. language hat says
    September 12, 2003 at 4:25 pm

    Too bad; I was hoping for something more culturally revealing. Thanks for the info!

  5. Justin says
    September 13, 2003 at 10:51 pm

    Oleg- how did they render the line about the beginning along the lines of “It’s Winnie ther Pooh. Don’t you know what ther means?”

  6. AmZ says
    January 17, 2004 at 10:06 am

    Q: What do Alexande the great and Winnie the Pooh have in common?
    A: A middle name.

  7. Tore says
    April 25, 2005 at 10:27 pm

    Actually, in the Swedish (nordic?) version Winnie the Pooh is rendered as “Nalle Puh”, where nalle is the diminutive form for bear, commonly used for teddy bears and such.

  8. Lars (the original one) says
    July 23, 2019 at 5:55 am

    Actually, it’s Peter Plys = ‘Peter the Plush’ in Danish, and Ole Brumm ~ ‘Peter Hum’ in Norwegian. (Ole is kind of the archetypical boy’s name in children’s books, I think that would be Peter in British English).

  9. January First-of-May says
    July 23, 2019 at 6:47 am

    In Russian versions the names are just transliterations of the original names. Mickey Mouse becomes “Mikki Maus”, “Scroodge McDuck” becomes “Scrudzh Mak-Dak” and so forth.

    True for most of them (including both of your examples), but there are exceptions – for example, the Beagle brothers become the Gavs brothers in Russian (братья Гавс).

    The Wikipedia article is gone now, alas; I assume that Dagobert Duck is French for Donald Duck?
    By now I pretty much can’t see the name Dagobert without one of those Saint Eloy rhymes coming up (even though I don’t even remember them that much) – but in this particular case, the effect was probably deliberate.

  10. PlasticPaddy says
    July 23, 2019 at 7:26 am

    Dagobert is Scrooge, not Donald.
    From German wikipedia:
    “Seinen deutschen Vornamen entlehnte die Übersetzerin Erika Fuchs den gleichnamigen Mitgliedern des fränkischen Königsgeschlechts der Merowinger.”, I. e., the German translator just used a name from the Merovingian royal family. The name in itself does not suggest greed or penny-pinching.

  11. David Marjanović says
    July 23, 2019 at 7:38 am

    If anything, the name suggests “way over-the-top old-fashioned”, which is sometimes accurate.

    Donald remains unchanged in German, at least in spelling.

  12. languagehat says
    July 23, 2019 at 8:16 am

    The Wikipedia article is gone now, alas

    Jesus, those frigging WikiCabal cops. There are articles lovingly listing every single appurtenance of every single Pokemon or Star Trek personage and piece of equipment, but God forbid anyone should defile the sacred site with Ducks.

  13. Tim May says
    July 23, 2019 at 8:26 am

    I don’t know on what grounds that specific article (“Disney characters’ names in various languages”) was deleted thirteen years ago, but there’s no shortage of stuff about the Ducks on there.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Duck_universe
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Donald_Duck_universe_characters
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_family_(Disney)
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clan_McDuck
    and so on.

  14. languagehat says
    July 23, 2019 at 8:47 am

    Huh. Maybe the thought process was “you can check the names in the articles in the various languages”? But 1) it’s a lot easier to have them in one place, and 2) not all the languages have such articles. I continue to gripe!

  15. January First-of-May says
    July 23, 2019 at 1:24 pm

    Huh. Maybe the thought process was “you can check the names in the articles in the various languages”?

    That, plus the general original-research-ness, was, in fact, the impression I got from the deletion discussion.

  16. languagehat says
    July 23, 2019 at 1:49 pm

    I read as much as I could stand of that. It’s just ad hoc justifications to justify a deletion that was made because somebody with prestige didn’t like the article. A great many deletions are like that. You can justify anything with a judicious application of the many rules.

  17. languagehat says
    October 14, 2020 at 9:25 am

    I’ve now replaced the links with archived versions; thank god for the Wayback Machine.

  18. Lars Mathiesen says
    October 14, 2020 at 2:07 pm

    Article deletion is a big gaping hole in the idea that you can’t hide your actions on Wikipedia — maybe you can achieve plausible deniability with VPNs and sock puppets and what not, but the fact that somebody made a specific edit is there forever. Unless you can get the article deleted.

    There are of course good reasons why a lot of articles that are created in bad faith should not be accessible, but it also loses large chunks of history when articles are merged, for instance. There is no way for anyone with less than an administrator role to find out what was left out.

  19. David Marjanović says
    October 14, 2020 at 3:30 pm

    When articles are merged, the contents of n – 1 of them are replaced by redirects, but those are still accessible and retain their history and talk pages… or has that changed?

  20. Lars Mathiesen says
    October 15, 2020 at 6:20 am

    I just remember having a problem finding the old content of something very uncontroversial — geology of a Danish island or something — because it had been merged. Maybe the redirect had been removed too, I don’t remember the details.

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