Translations by Brian Friel focuses on how language constructs and shapes reality, but particularly how indeterminate the meaning of words can be. Language is the whole body of words and of methods of combining them, used by a nation, a people, or a race. Translations challenges the view that words can coherently define and label the world with its mix of languages and differences in interpretation. Cultural identity and the importance of its association with language is a prominent issue. Through reflecting on communication difficulties between the two languages and cultures, Gaelic Irish and English, the meanings and authority of words are changed from being perceived as certain, to destabilized.

Language is used to reflect the cultural identity of the Irish and English. The play is performed and transcribed in English, although the majority of the Irish characters are really speaking Gaelic, along with a minor mix of the classic languages of Latin and Greek. Language becomes a prominent example of the dispossession of the Irish by the English. The gradual domination of the English language over Gaelic is evident in both the remapping of Ireland by the Ordnance survey and the attitudes of the characters themselves. English for example, was used “usually for the purposes of commerce”, and therefore “couldn’t really express” the land and culture of the Irish, but once it became “the language of government, law and learning” (MacIntyre), the expression of cultural identity for the Irish became unfamiliar. The authority to which normally a name is granted to its person is irrelevant to the English in the play, particularly evident in their (Lancey and Yolland’s) ignorance of Owen’s real name. Owen becomes a symbol for the linguistic dispossession of the Irish – they are forced to lose previous independence and take on a sort of double identity in acquiescence to the English.

Friel demonstrates his philosophy on the meaning of language throughout the play. His theory of language is similar to many structuralist and post structuralist models, which main assumptions can be combined into three main principles – the language is the central meaning making system in our culture, that it does not contain fixed and objective meanings, and that language is the creator of worlds and we are both its producers and its products. Essentially, this means that although we seek to define language, we and our world are also defined by it.

The association between the classic tongues of Greek and Latin to Gaelic meant that the antiquity, nobility, dignity and beauty of the old languages were linked to Gaelic and Irish culture. To the Irish, their “own culture and the classical languages made a happier conjugation, and “English succeeds in making…” what they wished to express sound “…plebian.” Again, language is revealed as not merely an objective expression of fact, but rather a subjective expression of spirituality and beauty, a certain perspective of the world – “certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives”. Translations emphasize the idea of the etymology of words, that “they are not immortal”. The Irish are represented as a civilization that is “…imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of fact”. Due to the fact that “…the Apocalypse is just about to happen” in the Anglicization of Ireland, the “old language” is seen as a “barrier to modern progress”.

The play Translations is a prominent example of the necessity of mutual understanding, and the difficulty in which a mostly exact meaning of a word or words is lost in the process of translating and interpreting. Translations also emphasizes the barriers and links created between those who speak the same language and those who do not, to quote Ovid –“I am a barbarian in this place because I am not understood by anyone.” To an extent, we are restricted by a belief that language, or rather, our own language, is the only way to describe the world and coherently express ourselves. This belief in the ability of language to set determinate meanings is undermined when there is a clash between two languages, such as Gaelic and English, or when words cannot accurately describe something. To translate is the action or process of turning from one language into another; a version in a different language. Language is inseparable from the land, history and culture of a people, and therefore when translation occurs, meaning can become destabilized and incoherent.

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