Like all rewritings, a translation is highly related to the environmen­tal factors – social, temporal, cultural – in relation to which it is produced. Much more than the original works, which are timeless, translations depend on the particular time that fashioned them. It can even be said that there is no translation “forever”: the transla­tion must always be redone. If the original is never outdated, the translation must always be updated, otherwise, it will become incomprehensible. It is for good reason that retranslation is a concept in its own right in the field of Translation Studies. The case of the presence of Chinese theatre in the French language is a good example of this need to translate and retranslate again in order to meet the expectations of different historical periods, including ours. This relationship has a history of more than three centuries, which gives us enough perspective to understand how different eras produced their own Chinese dramas.