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Translations by Brian Friel

Performance and publication
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The staging in Derry was significant for a number reasons. Friel and Stephen Rea thought of Derry as a clean slate where they could have more creative control over their work. Rea also thought that the play had a much profounder impact being staged in Derry than if it had been staged in Dublin. Art Ó Briain also pushed for a Derry staging. Furthermore, Guildhall's proximity to the play's Donegal setting and the strong Northern accents of the mostly Ulster cast created a strong sense of "local pride" and "community passion". Derry itself was also the subject of a name dispute, fitting for a play "concerned with place names".

Inspirations and Influences
Five years prior to writing Translations, Friel mentioned a number of topics going through his mind: a play set sometime between the Act of Union and the Great Famine in the 19th century; a play about Daniel O'Connell and the Catholic Emancipation; a play about colonialism; and a play about the death of the Irish language, the acquisition of English and its profound effects. During this time, Friel had made a couple of accidental discoveries: that his great-great-grandfather was a hedge-schoolmaster, leading Friel to read about hedge-schools in Ireland; and that the first trignometrical base set up by the Ordnance Survey in 1828 was next to his residence in Muff, leading him to read about the man in charge of the survey, Colonel Thomas Frederick Colby, who would later serve as inspiration for one of Translation's characters, Captain Lancey. Friel then discovered A Paper Landscape in 1976, which synthesized everything he had been thinking about into the perfect metaphor, map-making, serving as the foundation for his work.

A Paper Landscape was written by John Hardwood Andrews and first published in 1975 by Oxford University Press. It examines the Ordnance Survey's map-making operation in Ireland which begun in 1824, with the first maps appearing between 1835 and 1846, and production continuing until almost the end of the century.

"Friel's reading of George Steiner's After Babel was absolutely essential to the creation of Translations."

Characters

 * Manus - a scholar who is his late twenties/thirties who is one of Hugh's sons and lame. He only speaks Irish in front of the British, even though he knows how to speak English. He tries to teach Sarah how to speak.
 * Sarah - she has had a speech defect all her life, leading many in the town to consider her dumb.
 * Jimmy Jack Cassie - the "infant prodigy" is a bachelor in his sixties, who never washes or changes his clothes. Despite being fluent in both Latin and Greek, he still enjoys attending the hedge-school.
 * Máire - a strong woman in her twenties, she wants to learn English so that she can immigrate to America.
 * Doalty - a young man who sabotages the theodolite machine. He studies at the local hedge-school.
 * Bridget - a young girl with "a countrywoman's instinctive cunning". She studies at the local hedge-school.
 * Hugh - a large man in his late sixties, perpetually drunk. He is hedge-master at Baile Beag's hedge-school, often quizzing his students on the origins of words.
 * Owen - a well dressed, handsome young man in his twenties, who is also one of Hugh's sons. He is employed part-time by the British to provide English translations of place names in Ireland. The British mistakenly call him Roland.
 * Captain Lancey - a middle-aged officer, competent at cartography but lacking in social skills.
 * Lieutenant Yolland - in his late twenties/early thirties, with a tall awkward appearance. He is in Ireland by chance. Having missed his boat to India, he subsequently enlisted in the Army, was assigned to the Engineers, then posted to Dublin, and finally sent to Baile Beag with the Ordnance Survey. He often proclaims his admiration for the Irish culture and language despite being unable to speak it. He falls in love with Maire.
 * Donnelly Twins - they are referred to several times throughout the play, but are never shown on-stage.

Criticism & Interpretations
Translations received a wide range of interpretations and reactions since its Derry staging. In spite of the irony of it being played in the Guildhall, "a symbol of Unionist power", the Sinn Féin weekly An Phoblacht wrote that "Translations deals powerfully with a number of themes of particular interest to Republicans", and yet the unionist Lord Mayor of Derry led a standing ovation on opening night.

Sean Connolly criticized the historical liberties taken in Translations, writing that Friel "presents a grossly oversimplified view of the forces behind the abandonment of Irish."

The philosopher Richard Kearney argued that Translations presented language not as a naming system, but as a way to find new relationships between the "sundered cultural identities of the island".

Historical Inaccuracies
John H. Andrews challenged many of Friel's representations of the Ordnance Survey, concerned that they be taken as historically plausible or true. For example, anglicized place names were already being used throughout Ireland, so it is "dangerously ambiguous to to describe what the Survey did as 'naming'." Many of the names on the new maps were already widely being used in Ireland, and that there were no laws or obligations to use any of the Ordnance Survey names. As well, the soldiers going on survey duty were presented in the play as "prodding every inch of ground with their bayonets", even though they historically would not have had bayonets. When Yolland, one of the Ordnance Survey officers, disappeared, Lancey threatened to retaliate by shooting live-stock and evicting people when in actuality, the soldiers would have left issues of crime and civil disturbance to the local constabulary. There were also inconsistencies in some of the dates. For example, Donegal had already been renamed by the time of the play in 1833, but was actually renamed in 1835, and the actual Yolland that Lieutenant Yolland is based off of did not join the survey department until 1838.

Kevin Barry organized a debate in 1983 between Friel and Andrews, where Friel admits to "tiny bruises inflicted on history in the play". Kevin Barry forgave the historical liberties that Translations makes, writing that it revealed the 'hidden Ireland', making use of the 'unreality of fiction in order to imagine answers' to questions that even the English mapmakers had about the Irish people. Even though it is a work of fictional drama, this aspect of it makes the work complementary to A Paper Landscape, which privileged the records of those who had the authority to write, while excluding those who were defeated.

Owen
Owen is "by far the most complex character onstage", embodying 'all the conflicts and tensions in the play'. Owen arrives as an interpreter for the English in the Irish village, establishing himself as a pivotal cog in the social fabric of Baile Beag. He is comfortable being called interchangeably as Owen by the locals and Roland by the British, yet denies his heritage - "my job is to translate the quaint, archaic tongue you people persist in speaking into the King's good English". While claiming to be the "same me"; he is not - he is one part Irish and one part British, and acts as a crucial go-between, a role which he also denies, leading him to be less concerned with the social repercussions of his work. In the play, he is responsible for bringing together Maire and Yolland, but refuses to take responsibility for the effects of his actions; without Owen to fill the gap at the center, the union is doomed - just like Baile Beag and the English force. Owen's role in the destruction of Baile Beag is alluded to by Hugh's drunken recitation of the Aeneid near the end of the play. The lines refer to Carthage, the legendary North African settlement of Dido, and, in history, the notorious thorn in imperial Rome’s side that was finally sacked and conquered in the Third Punic War - by analogy the Romans are the British and the Carthaginians the Irish.