The Globe to Globe production of Love's Labour's Lost was billed as one of the more unusual acts of translation in the Festival: from Shakespeare's ‘rich, pun-riddled text’ into the ‘physical language of BSL’. Deafinitely Theatre, an ‘independent, professional Deaf-led company’ based in London, set out to transform a play all about verbal excess into the visual medium of British Sign Language (BSL). Despite being one of the more local of the global visitors to the Festival, the company's language was foreign to many in the audience. Deafinitely's production was also billed as ‘the first full-length Shakespeare play to be performed in BSL’. Video recordings of 1990s Arts Council-funded, small-cast BSL film adaptations of The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night exist, but more frequently reported is the BSL interpretation of hearing performances for Deaf audiences: ‘the live interpretation of a spoken message in real time’, as opposed to translation, or ‘working with written source and target forms’. In this fast-paced work, the interpreter focuses on ‘understanding the intended meaning of the message’, capturing ‘the power of the plots, the nuances and sub-plots’, and ‘the richness of the characters’, if not the form of the language. Other studies have suggested how interpretations borrow from performance and gestural traditions to effect better ‘cultural mediation’. Proponents of American Sign Language (ASL) theatre have recently sought more rigorous techniques for the full translation of Shakespeare. Peter Novak, leader of the ASL Shakespeare Project established at Yale, suggests that merely asking actors to translate their lines from English into ASL ‘mitigates against any linguistic, stylistic or historical continuity’, and that the ideal ASL translation does not remove sound or intricate rhymes, but ‘searches for a new paradigm of communication that decodes Shakespeare's spoken text and reproduces it visually’.