User:RM395/Course/Manypedia/Krampus

I chose to compare the English and German versions of the Wikipedia articles for the Krampus. The Krampus is a creature of folk lore from Germany who was said to punish bad children on Christmas like how Saint Nicholas rewarded the good ones. I chose to compare these articles because I wanted to compare how a folk lore was told from the country of origin compared to a country that has probably never heard of it before. The two articles were actually quite different. The English page I think tries to Americanize the legend so the people have something to relate to. The English page uses the Krampus as an opposite to Santa Clause saying he just punishes children who misbehave while Santa rewards them on Christmas. The German page goes into detail about how the Krampus is more like the boogeyman and that there is more than one of them. The German page says that the Krampus terrorizes kids during the yule season and is mainly just to scare them into behaving well. The English page also adds something to the lore that the German page does not have. The English page says the Krampus packs bad children into his sack and takes them with him, like how Santa brings things in his sack. There is no mention of this from the German page which is the country of origin of the Krampus legend. I found in my comparison pretty much what I was expecting to find. I figured the English version would change things because it would not fully understand the background of the legend that might be there on the German page. I do not know particularly much about the Krampus so I can not verify which page is more accurate. I would imagine that some things got lost in the translation from language to language and some things get added. This is probably the reason for the description of the legends being so different on the pages. The description of the Krampus itself was similar between the two articles, it was just the lore of the existence of the Krampus that was different.--SJRick (talk) 08:04, 25 March 2013 (UTC)