ABSTRACT
The principal difficulty resides in the nature of the text itself, for whilst interlingual translation involves the transfer of a given written text from the source language (SL) to the target language (TL), all kinds of factors other than the linguistic are involved in the case of theatre texts. Reading King Lear through such images serves as a starting-point for the creation of an authentic TL text that is both a translation of an original written by a Renaissance Englishman but is also a uniquely Italian or Russian work in its own right. Serpieri's theory, discussed in monolingual terms only so far, may help in the locating of a key for the translator searching for the magic doorway that will lead through the labyrinth of multiple codes. The strategy of collaborative translation may suggest ways of tackling this problem. The native SL speaker and the native TL speaker may have an instinctive sense of deixis in a given scene.
