Research Guides: How to Find Translations into and from English: Plays

Play Index

Online Version:

Play Index This link opens in a new window
Use this source to locate plays published individually or in anthologies published from 1949 to the present. Play Index covers a wide range of plays written in or translated into English, including mysteries, pageants, plays in verse, puppet performances, radio and television plays, and classic drama.

Paper Version:

Bobst REF1 Index (Z5781 .P53) YEARS:1949/1952-

Finding English Translations of Plays

If you know the foreign language title of the play that you are looking for, do a title search in BobCat or WorldCat, and limit the results by English language.

It is often worth finding out the title in the original language, since there can be more than one English-language variant.

Chekhov's Чайка, for example, has been translated into English as:

The Sea Gull,
The Seagull, and
The Sea-Gull

Translators may even deliberately try to find a new translation for a title to distinguish their translation from others. In many cases, however, a title search under the commonly-known English title (Three Sisters) will be successful.

Also, in BobCat and WorldCat do an author-title search using the title word "Plays," to see if the play you are looking for appears in an anthology of the author's plays. In most cases, the titles of the plays in a book will be listed in the search results