THIS
SITE IS CURRENTLY IN TRANSITION DUE TO A CHANGE
IN SERVERS SO MANY OF THE LINKS BELOW MAY NOT BE
FUNCTIONING. CONTENT AND FORMAT ARE BEING
REVISED AND THE NEW FILES WILL BE UPLOADED
EVENTUALLY. THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE.
Welcome to the "Around the World with Nancy Drew" web
page, an unofficial site that seeks to inform Nancy Drew
fans and collectors about the international aspects of
our favorite girl sleuth's adventures. Not only does
Nancy circle the globe in search of clues, but her
stories have also been translated into a variety of
languages. Author Carolyn Keene must have been
quite a linguist! I list below the
foreign countries where I have found evidence of Nancy
Drew stories being released in the local language. As
Karen Plunkett-Powell explains in her 1993 book The
Nancy Drew Scrapbook (copyright © 1993, St.
Martins' Press):
Through the decades, numerous magazine articles have reported that Nancy Drew Mystery stories were translated into fourteen languages; others cited numbers as high as twenty-five. Because the foreign publishing market ebbs and flows, there are no accurate statistics of exactly how many different countries have licensed and translated the Nancy Drew mysteries since the 1930s.
This has made my task a little confusing, at best. So far I have found evidence of translations into 26 languages (27 if you count the Queen's English as a foreign tongue). Do you know of any I have missed? Please let me know!
There are two corollary pages to this site which I hope you can also visit. First there is an overview of the international sites where Nancy's mysteries have taken place. Nancy has also been many places within the U.S.A. - has she visited your state yet? Much to my dismay, I must report that, to my knowledge, Nancy has only visited 6 out of the 7 continents; while the Hardy Boys have made it to Antarctica, this is still on Nan's "Need To Visit" list. Someday I hope to have a scrapbook showing some of the sites Nancy has seen on her trips, as well as some pages from her passport.
FOREIGN EDITION NANCYS
Nancy often undergoes a personality change when the publishers abroad set to market her to the international pre-pubescent set. Some examples of Nancy's new names are Alice Roy in France, Kitty Drew in Sweden and Paula Drew in Finland. Please click on the flags below to begin your journey around the publishing world, and discover and the titles I have been able to identify from the various countries.
I have started a blog to easily post
the newest foreign edition Nancy Drew covers as
they are released. Check out the Around
the World with Nancy Drew blog!
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 Malaysia 
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 Mexico |
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 Greece |
 Spain |
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 Iceland |
 Sweden |
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 Indonesia |
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On the subsequent pages I have tried to present a consistent outline of the information, which sometimes is easier said than done. As you click on the pages below, you will see that I have divided my research by the various publishers from each country. Beneath a brief description of the foreign edition is a yellow box containing the physical description of the books issued by that publisher. To the right I have scanned an example of the foreign edition (when I had one available) for your viewing pleasure. One note of warning - the server can be quite slow and the image files may take a while to load. I have tried to maintain a balance between keeping the image files to a reasonable size while preserving as much clarity and detail of each cover so you can see some of the neat artwork that has been created for the international editions. I think it's really fun to see how others around the globe perceive and represent Nancy.
Lastly I list all the foreign titles I have been able to find, in a grid. Sometimes the source I used would also list the original American title in the record, but oftentimes I was reduced to looking up the words from the foreign title in the dictionary, and then making an educated guess when matching the garbled translation to a familiar U.S. title. Needless to say, I am sure I made lots of mistakes, and I would greatly appreciate any help in correcting these - let me know if you spot any on the following pages.
For those of you looking to expand your own international Nancy Drew collection, I have launched a page devoted to sales of these formats. Click here for complete listing!
As a collector myself, I am always interested in hearing from you regarding your international Nancy Drew collection, and welcome any offers to help expand my personal collection. I would also like to hear from others regarding omissions and errors in the information found within the site; the content is a mixture of my empirical observations as well as data accumulated from library databases around the world. This methodology is hardly exhaustive, and I definitely need the help of others with first-hand knowledge of these foreign editions to expand my expertise on the subject. I also welcome any help in regards to my very amateurish efforts of translating the titles. I look forward to hearing from other International Nancy Drew enthusiasts by email.
