IRELAND IN 1833
“A map is a representation on paper – a picture – you understand picture?” — Lancey
Translations takes place in 1833 as British soldiers survey the Irish-speaking community of BaileBeag/Ballybeg, the fictional Donegal town where Brian Friel set several of his plays. A local makeshift school is disrupted by the arrival of these soldiers, who are tasked with mapping Ireland and anglicizing the Irish place names. The events of Translations occur as Britain tightens its stronghold on a weakening Ireland, 35 years after a failed rebellion and a decade prior to a famine which cut the country’s population in half, the effects of which have been irrevocable to this day.
“The road to Sligo. A spring morning. 1798. Going into battle.” — Hugh
The Irish Rebellion of 1798, coordinated by the Society of United Irishmen, was an attempt to end British rule in Ireland following recent revolutions in both America and France. Irish revolutionary Wolfe Tone led the effort, which was unsuccessful despite support from French forces. The United Irishmen spent five months fighting for equal rights for the Irish and for the end of religious persecution in their country, but failed due to a lack of adequate supplies. As a result of the rebellion, the Acts of Union were passed in 1800, uniting Ireland with Great Britain under the name of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
“What was Plato himself but a hedge-school master?” – William Carleton, Irish writer
The Irish characters in Translations speak English on stage for the benefit of a presumably English-speaking audience. However, given the setting of 1830s Donegal, the audience are to assume the Irish characters are speaking their native language. The students practice Latin and Greek at a hedge-school, an informal education model which became popular out of necessity following the introduction of Penal Laws in 1695. One such law, the Education Act, restricted the education of Catholics in Ireland, and so hedge-schools allowed Catholic students to secretly receive an education. Classes took place outdoors in many cases – hence the name ‘hedge-school’ – or else were taught in local homes or the teacher’s own house.
In 1829, four years before the events of the play, Daniel O’Connell successfully led a movement to overturn Penal Laws and secure the Catholic Emancipation Act. Despite his advocacy for the rights of Catholics, O’Connell saw English as the language of the future – and he was, in part, correct. By the 1830s, the National School System began rolling out, which required children to attend formal schooling by law with English as the sole medium of instruction. The National School System dispelled the last of the hedge-schools, and Irish students were denied the option to be educated in their native tongue until 1878.
“The speech being Irish, the heart must needs be Irish.” – Edmund Spenser, English poet
Following the Catholic Emancipation Act, Britain needed to find new inroads into controlling Irish culture and language. In 1824, the UK Parliament commissioned a new map of Ireland with Colonel Thomas Colby at the helm for the purpose of updating land valuations for taxation. The soldiers surveying the land were instructed on how best to standardize the place names they encountered and Irish civilians were employed to examine the evidence for the anglicized versions of Irish townlands. The anglicization was informed by several methods, including spelling, phonetics, and direct translation; ‘Baile’, meaning town, became ‘Bally’, due to its spelling and phonetics. Renaming the land was a form of linguistic imperialism so that Britain not only controlled the property, but the language with which it was referred to.
“The play has to do with language and only language.” – Brian Friel
Following the events of Translations, rural communities similar to the fictional Ballybeg endured depopulation as a result of the Great Famine, which began in 1845. The country’s population dropped by 20-25% between 1841 and 1871; Ireland is the only country in the world to have a smaller population today than it had 180 years ago.
This depopulation, combined with the roll-out of the English-medium National School System, depleted the use of the Irish language significantly. In 1845, there were an estimated 4.5 million Irish language speakers, but by 1901, that had dropped to an estimated 641,000 Irish speakers.
Today, the Irish language is taught at both primary and secondary school level, and there are more than 370 Irish-medium schools, known as Gaelscoileanna, on the island of Ireland. Most Irish children speak their native language daily because of their school system. Districts of Ireland known as Gaeltacht areas speak Irish as their predominant vernacular and are recognized by the government as such; there are 72,000 daily users of the Irish language, and more than 1.9 million people having the ability to speak some Irish. Irish is recognized by the Irish government as the first official language of Ireland.