The purpose of the paper is to identify and understand the cultural processes that went into the process of translating Shakespearian plays into Kannada during the Navodaya (renaissance) and Navya (modern) periods of modern Kannada literature. Translation has been viewed here more as a cultural process involving domination, assimilation, and contestation rather than as a literary act of bringing a text from one language into another. Translation as an act of transfer of knowledge, information and ideas from one language to another is a colonial enterprise, which implies certain relationships of power among the languages and cultures involved. Thus, in order to understand the postcolonial translations of a linguistically constructed region, one needs to interrogate the colonial links, nature of interrelationship among languages involved in the contact and their linguistic history. Tracing the process of translating Shakespeare in a chronological order from the colonial to the postcolonial period, the paper points out that the selections and avoidance of texts for translation, the popularity of certain texts revealed by multiple translations of a text, transformations in the title of translations, deviations in translation etc. actually reveal the processes of constructing dominations and counter constructions. The paper also attempts to incorporate the role of the theatre both professional and amateur, and its audience in bringing about such changes and transformations.