[1] Baile Beag ("Small Town") is a fictional village, created by Friel as a setting for several of his plays,[2] although there are many real places called Ballybeg throughout Ireland.

According to Kathimerini newspaper, the photos of the Athenian performance that arrived at his home in Donegal made him decide to make the not easy journey.

[11] Translations was adapted for a Catalan audience in February, 2014 by Ferran Utzet, and performed at the Biblioteca de Catalunya (Library of Catalonia) in Barcelona.

[13] Translations were performed at the Olivier Theatre from 22 May to 11 August 2018, starring Colin Morgan as Owen and Ciarán Hinds as his father.

[16] 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 trigonometrical 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.

[16] 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.

It examines the Ordnance Survey's map-making operation in Ireland which began in 1824, with the first maps appearing between 1835 and 1846, and production continuing until almost the end of the century.

[18] The play opens with a Hedge School in Baile Beag, it is supposedly run by the alcoholic schoolmaster Hugh, although his lame aspiring teacher son Manus does most of the work, and is mistreated by his father despite this.

The action begins when Owen (mistakenly pronounced as Roland by his English friend), the younger (and favorite) son of Hugh who consequently has a strained relationship with Manus, returning home after six years away in Dublin.

While Owen has no qualms about anglicising the names of places that form part of his heritage, Yolland, who has fallen in love with Ireland, is unhappy with what he perceives as a destruction of Irish culture and language.

The play ends ambiguously, with the schoolmaster Hugh drunkenly reciting the opening of Virgil's Aeneid, which tells of the inevitability of conquest but also of its impermanence.

[19] However through the choice of setting, Friel reveals his attempt to maintain an ideological distance from the ongoing Northern Irish Troubles and the era's extremely divisive political climate.

[20] As Friel said of the process of dislocating Translations from the political context of the late 70's and early 80's, "I know of no Irish writer who is not passionately engaged in our current problems.

[23] Within Translations, the relationship between the British officer Yolland and Máire the native Irish speaker, points to the binary of political belief in Northern Ireland between Unionists and Republicans.

[21] The couple, who cannot speak one another's language, nevertheless fall in love, a potent message of reconciliation and co-existence to the politically divided communities of Northern Ireland.

[22] The imposition of the new national school was, in part, an attempt by the Dublin Castle administration to replace Irish by English as the sole medium of instruction.

This change of the educational system, similar to the translation of the place names on the map, has been called the "rape of a country's linguistic and cultural heritage".

[29] As the Irish scholar Declan Kiberd remarks, "one of the first policies formulated by the Norman occupiers was to erase Gaelic culture".

[22] Postcolonial scholar Shaun Richards argues that Friel uses these two historical events as the framing for his discussion of colonialism within Translations.

"[32] In this sense, Friel highlights the destructive nature of the colonial projects depicted in Translations, literally 'distorting' the landscape of Ireland by the Anglicisation of place-names and replacing the use of native language with a foreign one.

Edward Said saw Translations as firmly within the post-colonial discourse, "Brian Friel’s immensely resonant play Translations...immediately calls forth many echoes and parallels in an Indian, Algerian, or Palestinian reader...the silencing of their voices, the renaming of places and replacement of languages by the imperial outsider, the creation of colonial maps and divisions also implied the attempted reshaping of societies, the imposition of foreign languages and other forms of dispossession.

Friel's dramatic conceit allows the audience access to either side of the language barrier, making the misunderstandings and miscommunications between Yolland and Maire in the love scene evident.

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

"[39] 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".

[16] 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.

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".

[44] The lines refer to Carthage, the legendary North African settlement of Dido, and, in history, the notorious thorn in ancient 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.