This paper deals with the linguistic and cultural determinations imposed by a little known (Anglo-African) source culture on translations info French of plays by the Anglophone Nigerían writer, 1986 Nobelprize winner, Wale Soyinka. The Yoruba background provides these plays with a tone language, a culture rooted in animism and techniques borrowed from a partly traditional, partly modern itinerant operatic theatre. Western influences show through in the use of standard English by the plays' Western educated protagonists, of keywords and phrases pointing to the plays' ideologies and of Western literart' models. The Anglo Nigerian elements, forming a rich though at timer hardly coherent synthesis of every source and influence, stand forth in the prevalence of Nigerian pidgin, image laden Nigerianized English and a tense, jerky and even abstruse style expressing both suffering, rebellion and a search for ultimate truths.