The author, who directed a version of Portrait de Dora in Dutch, speaks of translation in a theatrical and cultural sense: putting a written text on the stage is also a kind of translation, from words to bodies, and here complicated by the real or linguistic – and cultural – translation from the original French into Dutch. In the particular case of Dora’s character, body language is far from negligible, as it sometimes supports and at other times negates her spoken discourse. This fact convinced the director to employ two different actresses to incarnate Dora as a child and as a young woman.