Qualcuno mi deve spiegare questa faccenda che in nordeuropa Paperino lavori in una fabbrica di margarina...non è la prima volta che salta fuori questa storia. Chi l'ha inventata? e perchè?
Ecco quel che diceva in proposito Stefan Diös, traduttore Disney svedese, in un messaggio alla Disney Comics Mailing List (maggio 2001):
<< In WDC 165 (June 1954), and only this time as far as I know, Barks mentioned Donald working as "a delivery boy for a skunk oil factory". When the story first was published in Sweden (Kalle Anka & Co 2/1955), Donald's occupation was creatively rendered as "licking gummed tape on cardboard boxes at the margarine factory" (my own effort of literal translation from the Swedish text). This works fine, since the job is never shown, just mentioned (in a rather degrading tone, to boot).
Some time around the 1980's, several stories produced by Egmont (then Gutenberghus) started to show Donald working at a margarine factory in Duckburg. It happened so many times during the following years that, just as Anders Christian notes, it became something of a norm. If a regular reader was asked where Donald Duck worked, the likely answer would either be "in Uncle Scrooge's money bin" or "at the margarine factory". Then, as Egmont stories spread around the world like margarine, more people learned about this "fact", more writers began to use it (perhaps so urged by the editors), and it became a tradition. It might be noted that Donald obviously was promoted during the years: in all the time he has spent at various margarine factories around Duckburg, I cannot recall having seen him lick as much as one gummed tape onto the boxes!
Why did this all happen? Knowing that many prominent story writers and/or editors at Gutenberghus/Egmont were (and are) Swedish, the logical guess would be that one of them remembered the margarine factory as an "old classic fact of the 50's" and so wanted to use it in new stories to add some recognition. This makes sense, and it doesn't really matter whether this person knew that the reference only existed in the Swedish translation and only in this one story from 1955. (I don't know for sure if it was used in Swedish any other times in the 50's, but I doubt it.)
[...] An interesting side note is that I also have seen later-day instances of Donald working in the actual skunk oil factory. These stories are obviously written by people, American or others, well schooled in the original Barks canon. So this tiny reference by Barks in a story that dealt with something completely different gave birth to two distinct traditions! >>