Language and Society in "Translations"

Paper Summary:

This essay argues that Brian Friel's play, "Translations," is about the power and importance of language in keeping a cultural identity true to itself. The play concerns efforts of the British Army to rename Gaelic place names in a small Irish village with proper English names. The true purpose of the translations, however, which is to Anglicize the map of Ireland and undercut Irish power and nationalism, is kept from the Irish citizen. The paper also examines the concept of alienation that is created when characters are forced to deal with the loss of their cultural identity. The inability to completely translate the place names so that they retain their original meaning is ultimately a symbol of instability in the effort to enclose a subculture within a larger, foreign culture.

From the Paper:

"Another theme explored in the play is the way in which members of a society living under a colonialist government find themselves forced into varying forms of alienation in order to deal with the gradual loss of their own system of civilization (Brown, 196). This is clearly represented in the ways in which many of the characters in the play withdraw or wish to withdraw in some way out of social interaction. For instance, there is Sarah, who has withdrawn into herself so deeply that even the simple act of saying her name out loud becomes an almost joyous occasion. One way to escape the imprisonment of colonial domination is, of course, to leave the place being dominated, and this form of alienation is dealt with in the character of Maire, who longs to emigrate from Ireland to America."

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