Different translators have different motivations – to preserve, condemn, apply, enlighten, etc. – who are helped or hindered by the various opportunities and obstacles presented by the conventions. of a given literary mode. This article will seek to elucidate the unique opportunities that comedy offers to a translator, in this case William Shakespeare, of a play, The Brothers Menaechmus of Plautus. Because of the rules that govern comedy, Shakespeare had the opportunity to go beyond creating a copy of Plautus and merge his work with the original: The Comedy of Errors is an adaptation of Menaechmus, but it is also a continuation of its predecessor. Shakespeare's play should not be seen simply as a distinct and original work; it is that, but it is also the second part of a single and larger whole. In examining how puns and repetition work in the world of comedy, simple devices like puns and the running gag can provide a model for addressing more complex issues like the contiguity of thematic concerns in both works . It is common knowledge that a joke imported from one language into another loses something in translation, and, like all common knowledge, this is true to a certain extent. If the translator attempts to import the joke word for word into the new language, something will indeed be lost and the joke will almost certainly fail. The fact that literal translation does not work for comedy, however, should not be seen as a translation problem but simply as a problem for the literal-minded, because comedy is not the domain of the literal. Characters who adhere too closely to the literal rules of words and customs tend to find themselves in dire straits, and comedy translators should take inspiration from this...... middle of paper...... ity Press, 1966.Greene, Thomas M. The Light at Troy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Plautus. “The Menaechmus brothers”. Trans. EF Watling. The pot of gold and other plays.Ed. Betty Radice. London, England: Penguin Classics, 1965. 97-146.Shakespeare, William. “The Comedy of Errors.” The comedy of errors. Ed. Harry Levin. New York: New American Library, 2002. 1-75. Venuti, Lawrence. "Introduction." Rethink translation. Ed. Laurent Venuti. London, England: Routledge, 1992. 1-17. Vinay, Jean-Paul and Darbelnet, Jean. “A methodology for translation.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Laurent Venuti. London, England: Routledge, 2000. 84-93. Wofford, Susanne L. “Foreign Emotions on the Stage of Twelth Night.” Transnational exchange in modern theater. Ed. Robert Henke. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008. 141-157.