Hi, I hope you’re doing well.
For almost 3 years, I’ve been scouring the internet trying to find versions of Rainbow Magic in different languages and it’s been pretty fun, even though there were a ton to add and there’s probably more out there that I haven’t found yet. I went through all the languages on Google Translate checking for publications in each language and I think we’ve done them all. It’s been a cool journey and I thought since I’ve finished, why not write a whole blog about it?
Some facts[]
- Which language has Rainbow Magic been translated into the most?
Swedish - 110 books
Greek - 86 books
French - 72 books
Japanese - 55 books
Persian - 41 books
Italian - 40 books
Slovenian - 39 books
Portuguese (Portugal) - 37 books
Spanish - 35 books
Serbian - 32 books
Czech, German, Slovakian - 31 books
Dutch, Turkish - 28 books
Polish, Bulgarian - 15 books
Norwegian, Arabic - 14 books
Indonesian, Croatian - 8 books
Chinese, Danish, Hungarian, Korean, Lithuanian, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Welsh, Ukrainian - 7 books
- Which series is the most translated?
The Rainbow Fairies - they’re the first in the whole series so it makes sense to start from the beginning. The only language the Rainbow series HASN’T been translated into is Indonesian, but those ones were hard to find so they might be out there, just not on the internet.
- Which special is the most translated?
Holly the Christmas Fairy has been translated into 13 languages.
- Which language was translated first?
It seems Greece caught onto the fairy phenomenon soonest, translating their first books first in 2005. However, publish dates from obscure Greek websites 15 years ago aren’t that accurate but that’s what I found.
- Which was the most modern series to be translated?
As Rainbow Magic’s popularity in the UK has diminished, it has everywhere else too. The most recent series to be exported to another country was the Ocean Fairies in Greek in 2023. The newest series to be published in a different language is the School Days Fairies into Persian, in 2015.
- Lexs you seem to want to talk about yourself, which one is YOUR favourite?
I liked the German series because they gave the fairies surnames like ‘Emma Red-strawberry’ or ‘Milli Blue-sea’ and also cos German is probably the only other language I kind of know. I like the Swedish versions too because the covers were really high resolution, better than any UK cover on the Internet.
However, my favourite is the South Korean adaption because of their original illustrations, rather than using the same as the original UK ones. We get to see South Korea’s interpretation of Jack Frost and the girls, which differs hugely.
In the Korean redesign, I like Izzy’s Korean redesign with her long ponytail and Saffron’s hair. In the German “redesign” (they kept the outfits but just redrew the covers), I like the greener colours of Amy’s outfit since she was turned into the jade fairy, and India’s hair.
I also found the Persian (Iran) covers really interesting to see the lengths they went to to cover up all the fairies' shoulders and legs, making their dresses longer and adding sleeves and leggings. This version really shows how different our cultures are and how they've been enforced on these fairies. Some improvements actually look good, some look so badly edited I thought they were fanmade. I'm still not sure if they are but I added them to the wiki anyway. Here are some of my favourites.
- You can’t be THIS sad: you didn’t find ALL these yourself so who else helped?
PrincessRosalina added the Japanese, German, Welsh and some French-Scholastic covers. Anastasija Plotnikova added some Slovenian covers. Pricealexandra33 found the Ukrainian series, Jrduder added some French covers.
- What does this matter to the wiki?
I don’t know if people actually care about the International versions as much as I do, but it’s interesting to see the different cultural names and the spread of Rainbow Magic. Also, there’s nowhere else on the internet that compiles all these different versions of fairy books into lists (which you can find on each country's category page) so I’m quite proud of that.
If anyone finds another international version that I’ve missed out, please add it. I recommend you check out all the different German covers, South Korean covers and the Persian covers too, it's interesting to see different interpretations. Here are all the cool Korean illustrations I found that have nowhere else to belong but feel that need to be seen.
Thanks for reading!
LexsJBTalk 19:41, April 27, 2020 (UTC) (updated 3/9/22)
