The version most north Indians actually know is the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, begun at Ayodhya in 1574 and finished about three years later. It is not a translation. It is composed in Awadhi, an eastern Hindi vernacular, in seven kands mirroring Valmiki's but with a different theological centre: Rama is God without qualification, and the path offered to the reader is devotion. It is sung, recited in households, staged annually as the Ramlila across the Hindi belt, and quoted in ordinary speech. For most north Indian practice, it is the Ramayana; Valmiki's Sanskrit is the scholar's text.
The plurality goes much further. Kamban's Tamil Iramavataram, of about the twelfth century, is an independent poetic achievement with its own emphases. Krittibas Ojha produced a Bengali version in the fifteenth century. Jain retellings, beginning with Vimalasuri's Prakrit Paumachariya, make Ravana a noble Vidyadhara brought down by his own passion and have Lakshmana, not Rama, do the killing, since a Jain hero may not. The Buddhist Dasaratha Jataka makes Sita Rama's sister as well as his wife and dispenses with the war.
Outside India the story travelled with trade and with Sanskrit court culture. The Old Javanese Kakawin Ramayana dates from around the ninth century; Thailand's Ramakien is a national epic with its own iconography and royal associations; Cambodia has the Reamker, Laos the Phra Lak Phra Lam, the Malay world the Hikayat Seri Rama, in which Islamic framing sits over the Hindu narrative. A.K. Ramanujan's essay on the many Ramayanas made the point academically and, when Delhi University removed it from a syllabus in 2011 after protests, demonstrated how contested the point remains.