Schmidt focuses his efforts on bringing the world of the play to his contemporary audience rather than attempting to carry the audience back in time to seventeenth-century France. You should go to Paris to see a production that's running there right now. Although for Schmidt the act of translation follows specific rules, his notion of translation is somewhat broader. Virgil's Anaeid could be seen as a translation of Homer, as could Dante's Divine Comedy of Virgil. Taking a source, such as Plautus or Holinshed, they transformed it into something else.
Works of art are never original.
Although all literature is a form of translation to Schmidt, he draws a distinction between translation and adaptation. Schmidt himself has written what he would call adaptations in the past. A few years ago, the Guthrie Theatre asked me to work on The Triumph of Love by Marivaux. The director was interested in another Marivaux play and asked me to combine the two works into one. It was a matter of translating two plays, cutting them together to make one play, and then writing scenes of my own where they were needed to hold things together.