That’s so funny. I just though Läderlappen just sounds like german for “leather rag” and google does in fact translates it to “The Leather patch”.
I wonder what their thought process was in coming up with leather patch for batman.
So “läderlapp” is an old Swedish slang or colloquialism for bat. Back in the 50s when Batman was first brought to Sweden English literacy was a lot worse than it is now, and translating titles and names were much more common. A direct translation of Batman would be “fladdermusmannen” - which is a very unwieldy name - so they settled for a then-more-common slang for “the bat”. It does sound a little better, though it would have been best to just do what finally happened from the 80s and let Batman remain untranslated.
