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Erika Fuchs, née Petri (7 December 1906 – 22 April 2005), was a German translation. She is largely known in Germany for her major involvement in the localization process of American Disney comics, especially Carl Barks' stories about Duckburg and its inhabitants, as well the effects on the German language as a whole caused thereby.
Both her grammatical innovations and adaptation of classical literary features into modern pop-cultural works have been recognized as positive contributions to contemporary used language and to the image of comics as media in Germany, having played a major part in delegitimizing public perception of said comics as low-quality Pulp magazine. Fuchs' widely quoted translations have further been described standing in the tradition of great German-language light poetry such as the works of Heinrich Heine, Wilhelm Busch, and Kurt Tucholsky. She has been emblematically quoted as saying "You can't be educated enough to translate comic books", reflecting her high standards for localization work.
Following World War II, Erika Fuchs worked as a translator for the German edition of Reader's Digest, as well as for German literary magazine 'Story', published by Rowohlt Verlag since 1946. In 1951, she became chief editor of Disney's newly-formed German Micky Maus magazine, where she continued to work until her retirement in 1988.
After the death of her husband in 1984, Erika Fuchs moved to Munich, where she died on 22 April 2005.
An example of Fuchs' many allusions to classical German literature may be found in her translation of Barks's 1956 story "Three Un-Ducks" (INDUCKS story code W WDC 184-01), where Huey, Dewey, and Louie speak the oath " Wir wollen sein ein einig Volk von Brüdern, in keiner Not uns waschen und Gefahr" ("We Shall be a United People of Brethren, Never to Wash in Danger nor Distress"), thereby parodying Friedrich Schiller's version of the Rütlischwur from his 1804 play William Tell.
Her use of verbs shortened to their word stem as Interjection— not only to imitate sounds (onomatopoeia), such as schluck, stöhn, knarr, klimper (gulp, groan, creak, chink/jingle), but also to represent soundless events grübel, staun, zitter (ponder, goggle, tremble) — popularized the verb form. While the official technical term for this remains Inflektiv, the term Erikativ, a tongue-in-cheek reference to Fuchs' first name, made to resemble similar grammatical terms such as Infinitiv (infinitive), Indikativ (realis mood) or Akkusativ (accusative case), has seen more use. The form itself was commonly used as a form of Emote in and chatrooms well into the 2010s, with users seeking to simulate aspects of face-to-face communication by employing Inflektive of off-screen activities enclosed in Asterisk (e.g. * lach*, *weglauf*, *zwinker*).
In 1991, painter Gottfried Helnwein set a portrait of Fuchs among his work Die 48 bedeutendsten Frauen des Jahrhunderts ( 48 Most Important Women of the Century). The work is now to be found at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Gottfried Helnwein, Werke, Mischtechnik auf Leinwand, 48 Portraits , 1991, www.helnwein.de
A comic museum in her hometown of Schwarzenbach an der Saale, named after Erika Fuchs, saw its opening on 1 August 2015.
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