What to do if a run is unavailable in your language?

[alquackskey]

I've finally gotten around to reading DoubleDuck, and I'm really enjoying it!

Sadly, as I'm sure most of you know, Boom Kids! stopped publishing it after three volumes, despite the fact that there's a lot more of it to be read.
It's a long shot, but was any more of it ever published in English anywhere else?

It's a lot of fun, and I'd love to pick up some more if I could!

If that's not an option, does anyone have any ideas? If you're enjoying a run or interested in a run that's not available in your native language, what do you do?

(Also, mods, apologies for the title; difficult to phrase. And, for clarity's sake, I'm not asking for scans - just want to know if I'm totally out of luck here)

[bats]

Long story short, Disney comics are in general not published in English, so if that's the only language you know, your best bet is to import a foreign edition and do what you can to translate your way through it. Depends on how badly you want to read the story.

I remember sitting there in my teens with an Italian dictionary and working my way through a copy of Paperin Furioso, fun times.

[That Duckfan]

Jan 2, 2021 21:21:25 GMT bats said:

Long story short, Disney comics are in general not published in English, so if that's the only language you know, your best bet is to import a foreign edition and do what you can to translate your way through it. Depends on how badly you want to read the story.

I remember sitting there in my teens with an Italian dictionary and working my way through a copy of Paperin Furioso, fun times.

I learned quite a lot of English reading Gemstone volumes as a kid. I remember hitting Rosa's story notes in the Life and Times volume, being frustrated because I had no Dutch equivalent to compare it to! Those Walt Disney Treasures books, too. Thank you, Don and David. I never invested enough time in Italian to get it properly, but I got the gist of it most of the time. I also burned through German with a Barks biography, but that was a lot harder (no pictures!). What a way to learn a language!

I've seen some efforts by publishers trying to teach English through simple translations of Disney comics, but they have no life in them. Just print the original story and the Dutch translation side by side, and let the context do the rest! The kids'll pick up Italian and Danish in no time! 

I'm might try out something new later this year; the 1980s German treasure epics series were never properly collected here in Holland, but apparently they were recently re-released in two pocket volumes in Germany. Hoping to review those, see how that goes.

[RobbK1]

Jan 2, 2021 22:12:15 GMT That Duckfan said:

Jan 2, 2021 21:21:25 GMT bats said:

Long story short, Disney comics are in general not published in English, so if that's the only language you know, your best bet is to import a foreign edition and do what you can to translate your way through it. Depends on how badly you want to read the story.

I remember sitting there in my teens with an Italian dictionary and working my way through a copy of Paperin Furioso, fun times.

I learned quite a lot of English reading Gemstone volumes as a kid. I remember hitting Rosa's story notes in the Life and Times volume, being frustrated because I had no Dutch equivalent to compare it to! Those Walt Disney Treasures books, too. Thank you, Don and David. I never invested enough time in Italian to get it properly, but I got the gist of it most of the time. I also burned through German with a Barks biography, but that was a lot harder (no pictures!). What a way to learn a language!

I've seen some efforts by publishers trying to teach English through simple translations of Disney comics, but they have no life in them. Just print the original story and the Dutch translation side by side, and let the context do the rest! The kids'll pick up Italian and Danish in no time! 

I'm might try out something new later this year; the 1980s German treasure epics series were never properly collected here in Holland, but apparently they were recently re-released in two pocket volumes in Germany. Hoping to review those, see how that goes.

Several (albeit not all) of The German Schatsruhe series were printed in The 1980s' Dutch Dubbelalbum series.  That's where I learned about the series.  But, I know that Oberon missed out on printing several others of them.

[Matilda]

"If you're enjoying a run or interested in a run that's not available in your native language, what do you do?"

I do LOTS of ordering of comics from other countries. I'm American, native English speaker, read French fluently, can make my way through Dutch and German pretty well, have stumbled through a few Italian stories with GoogleTranslate. I can't read any Scandinavian languages, unfortunately--but then, Scandinavian comics would also be more difficult to order from the USA, since they don't use eBay, which is how/where I purchase almost all of my foreign Disney comics.

If there's a story I want to read that isn't published in English, here's what I do: I identify the issues I want to look for on INDUCKS, in order of preference (French, Dutch, German, Italian). Then I look for those issues on French eBay (eBay.fr), Dutch eBay (eBay.nl), German eBay (eBay.de), or Italian eBay (eBay.it). Look to see whether anyone is selling what I want who is (1) willing to ship to the USA and (2) accepts PayPal. I have had almost no problems doing this--almost everything I've ordered has eventually arrived, in the condition described, and only very rarely damaged in transit. There are a bunch of good sellers on French eBay who ship to the USA, and there used to be lots of individuals who sold used comics on German eBay who would ship here--I've been having more trouble finding people in eBay.de who will accept PayPal and/or ship to the USA in the last year, for some reason. Anyway, the eBay system is very customer-friendly for using between countries. You can even put something from a foreign eBay into your Watchlist, and most of the page will then automatically be translated into English, and you can do the ordering from your own Watchlist. Sometimes the cart system hasn't worked for me between countries, though. For instance, often the "request total" doesn't work between countries' eBays. But if I "commit to buy" several comics from the same seller, the seller will then invoice me with the total, having adjusted for group shipping.

Sometimes a seller who doesn't list as shipping to the USA will in fact do so, if you email them and ask. Always worth asking, if you can't find the issue anywhere else.

One of the reasons I rarely order used comics from Italy is that shipping from Italy to the USA is *very* expensive, way more than shipping from France or Germany.

I have never ordered new comics or subscribed to comics from another country, so I can't help you there. The only new foreign comics I've gotten were bought for me by friends traveling in Europe.

[Monkey_Feyerabend]

(Funny how you use the word 'run' here. As I am sure you know, there is no 'run' in Disney comics, that's a concept that only applies to Marvel and DC superheroes shenanigans....)

1. Find on Induck issues of (European) Disney magazines that contain the stories you need.
2. Search those issues on eBay.fr, eBay.it, eBay.de, eBay.nl, eBay.es or pt.eBay.com. You will have major shipping costs if you live in North America, but still much less expensive than moving to another county France, Germany or Italy. (Also, the plus is that European Disney magazines are 100+ pages, sometimes 300+, so you get a lot of other material, good or not.)
3. Use dictionaries and google translate.
In alternative you can subscribe to the digital versions of these magazines. Topolino magazine in Italy is available in digital every week, even if I don't know how back in time the archive available to digital subscribers goes. I am pretty sure that the Dutch and Danish Donald Duck magazine are available in digital too, although I am not sure, I cannot read those languages.

Me, personally, I cannot read comics in languages that I don't speak. Even just the idea of having to go back and forward between the pages and a dictionary makes me seasick. Too tiring, honestly. By the way, I have been trying for years to read novels in English, but so far I have always given up. To be clear, I live in England and currently I even teach in an English High School. Usually I only need the dictionary three or four of times per page in a novel. Unfortunately, that's all it takes to make me hoist white flag sooner or later. I am lazy, sorry. When it comes to comics I am lucky, as I speak French, English, Italian, three languages that have a tone of comics translations from all over the world. (Honestly, anything of some value in the medium of comics sooner or later will have at least a French edition.) So I am lucky enough that any comics/graphic novel/manga that I ever wanted to read so far existed in at least one of these idioms. But if I had to read anything with German words within...nah, I'd rather have a walk in the park.   

[alquackskey]

Thanks for the advice, everybody! It seems that it's exactly as I feared - I'll have to try to translate non-English copies.

I'm currently waiting on some other comics to arrive at the minute, so I'm waiting for a few to come in before ordering any more. That being said, I think that I might just end up following what you've all said.
Thankfully, not living in the USA, shipping should be a touch easier on me from EU countries - though I won't count my chickens yet!

The idea of going through INDUCKS is pretty solid - I'll definitely be using that! Following your suggestions, I've given it a quick look, and I'm already finding some solid information!
Thankfully, it seems that later issues of DoubleDuck have been collected fairly comfortably - just not in English.
It seems that Italian is the most readily available, so I'm just hoping that Google Translate would be enough to get me through!
...Maybe it's time I gave DuoLingo a look, either. Oh well, it'll likely be late January before I can get things in gear, I'll figure something out by then!

It's crazy what these Ducks can do to me - I never thought I'd see the day that I was so interested in a comic that I'd be trying to translate it just to see the rest of the story... yet, here we are.
Didn't think it would be DoubleDuck of all things to tip me over, but what can I say?

(Also, Monkey_Feyerabend, I know what you mean - it's not a term that would be used in most situations regarding the Ducks. I just used it absent-mindedly since I was referring to DoubleDuck in particular!)

[fredj]

I can recommend DuoLingo, been using it for about a year to brush up my French and it works, as long as you’re willing to put in the time. I also make use of Google Camera Translation on the phone while reading a digital copy on the Ipad. It’s not perfect but a bit more relaxing than typing every balloon. The French magazines have their own apps where one can either buy individual issues or subscribe and get access to the last 5 to 10 years.

[Spectrus]

I'm really interested to see how this pans out

[alquackskey]

So, just a quick update for anyone interested: I'm going ahead with things here!

I've started on DuoLingo for Italian - it's very basic, but I suppose it's only to get a general idea for now. I'll be using Google Translate for the most part, DuoLingo is most likely only going to help fill in the blanks where Google Translate fails.

As for the comics themselves, I've gone a slightly different route - after seeing the recommendation by bats in the Disney Masters thread, I figured I'd try to give Paperolimpiadi a look. I'll still be looking for DoubleDuck, of course, but it turns out that Comixology actually had the next issue in English as a digital exclusive, so that'll tide me over for a touch longer.

The only sellers that currently offer Paperolimpiadi in a full collection from what I can see (Tesori Disney 14) don't ship to Ireland, but I'm hoping that, as Matilda suggested, they might reconsider if asked politely! (Let's just hope that Google Translate works out on that one!)

[dancruz]

I'm Brazilian and I learned English reading comics. In fact, I learned English to read comics that hadn't been published in my country at that time.
So, maybe comic books can be a good incentive to learn other languages!

[alquackskey]

Jan 19, 2021 15:01:05 GMT dancruz said:

I'm Brazilian and I learned English reading comics. In fact, I learned English to read comics that hadn't been published in my country at that time.
So, maybe comic books can be a good incentive to learn other languages!

It's certainly worked as an incentive for me!

I ended up ordering not just Paperolimpiadi, but also 3 volumes of DoubleDuck because I couldn't resist.

I feel like I could definitely learn to understand Italian fairly well, given enough time.
Probably not enough to speak it, but I understand most of what I've learned so far!

From what I've looked into, general children/family media is actually a solid base for getting to understand a language better.
Something to do with how the language is meant to be more accessible, which makes it easier to understand.

Sadly, given the current global situation, it'll be a while before I can test that with these comics, but the logic definitely works out!

[Spectrus]

And if you have trouble understanding something, there's always scanlations out there

(I didn't want to mention it earlier because it's more or less against the rules & also because I'd rather see people supporting official releases. But once you already have the original, I don't see it as an issue to perhaps look at a translation, especially if there is no official English continuation in the pipeline.)

[alquackskey]

Jan 27, 2021 14:46:05 GMT Spectrus said:

And if you have trouble understanding something, there's always scanlations out there

(I didn't want to mention it earlier because it's more or less against the rules & also because I'd rather see people supporting official releases. But once you already have the original, I don't see it as an issue to perhaps look at a translation, especially if there is no official English continuation in the pipeline.)

In the interest of ensuring that the rules aren't accidentally broken, I won't say much on scanlations either.

When it comes to comics, I'm the type who would vastly prefer to have the physical copy. As far as Disney goes, the only time I've broken that was with DoubleDuck: Mission Thermic Core (As the only English release that I'm aware of is the digital release on Comixology).
Any discussion I could have on scanlations would probably go into sketchy territory, but in any case, I'm hoping that learning the language through Duolingo and using Google Translate will get me by - I actually have two DoubleDuck volumes in Italian now, but I can't read them yet because the volume set directly after Thermic Core hasn't arrived yet.
I was hoping Paperolimpiadi would arrive earlier, but that's not here yet either... 

To be honest, supporting the official releases doesn't mean too much to me - I'd like to, but the nearest comic shop to me is about an hour and a half by bus, and that's without Covid restrictions and whatnot. Even at that, they don't really tend to have much in the way of Duck or Mouse comics - the ones I have gotten from there were ones that they were trying to get rid of.
Issues with Amazon aside, I have gotten a decent number from there, which is as close as I can get to supporting the creators. Sadly, a lot of them are either out of stock on Amazon or not available there in the first place, so I end up having to buy them second-hand.
I get it, of course - my country certainly isn't a major market for comics, especially Disney ones - but it does make supporting official releases rather difficult.