Abstract :
All kinds of art performance in human society are the ways to send messages to the viewers, listeners or audiences. Art performance is also a means of translation to transfer the organisers’, the authors’, and the products’ ideas. This study, in the light of translatability of performance, highlights the features of theatre translation including its theory and discusses the history and development of drama translation on stage performance in Vietnam with a consideration of Shakespeare’s plays as a case study. The study has found that while drama translation has been studied widely in the world this area of research has been superficially concerned in Vietnam. Shakespeare’s plays have been translated for performance for a long time in neighbourhood countries, such as Japan, China and Thailand, Vietnam has not got itself full translations, but some adaptations.
