Different translators have different motives - to preserve, condemn, apply, illuminate, and so on - which are helped or hindered by the different opportunities and obstacles presented by the conventions of a given literary mode . This article will attempt to clarify the unique opportunities that comedy offers to a translator, in this case William Shakespeare, of a play, Plautus' The Brothers Menaechmus. Because of the rules governing 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 the his predecessor. Shakespeare's work should not be seen simply as a separate and original work; it is this, but it is also the second part of a single and larger whole. Looking at how wordplay and repetition work in the world of comedy, simple devices such as wordplay and the running gag can provide a model for addressing more complex issues such as the contiguity of thematic concerns in both works. It is well known that a joke imported from one language to another loses something in translation and, like all common knowledge, this is true up to a certain point. If the translator attempts to import the joke word for word into the new language, something will actually 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 problem for translation but simply as a problem for the literal-minded, since comedy is not the realm of the literal. Characters who adhere too closely to the literal rules of words and manners tend to find themselves in serious trouble, and comedy translators should take a cue from this...... middle of paper ......ity Press, 1966 . Greene, Thomas M. The Light at Troy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982. Plautus. “The Menechmus brothers”. Trans. E. F. Watling. The Pot of Gold and Other Comedies.Ed. Betty Root. London, England: Penguin Classics, 1965. 97-146.Shakespeare, William. “The Comedy of Errors”. The comedy of errors. Ed. Harry Levin. NewYork: New American Library, 2002. 1-75.Venuti, Lawrence. "Introduction." Rethink translation. Ed. Lorenzo Venuti. London, England: Routledge, 1992. 1-17.Vinay, Jean-Paul and Darbelnet, Jean. "A methodology for translation." The TranslationStudies reader. Ed. Lorenzo Venuti. London, England: Routledge, 2000. 84-93.Wofford, Susanne L. “Foreign Emotions on the Twelfth Night Stage.” Transnational exchange in early modern theatre. Ed. Roberto Henke. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2008. 141-157.