York, directed by Garry Hynes. The play was published in 1981 by Faber and Faber, who still publish it today. It is published in the United States and performance rights are held by Samuel French Inc. It is a set text on the Leaving Certificate English curriculum in Ireland and, in the United Kingdom, it remains a popular set text among English and Drama & Theatre A-Level students. It won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize for 1985. An Irish-language version of the play has been produced. The play has also been translated into Welsh by Elan Closs Stephens. The Welsh version has visited a number of venues in Wales and was first published by Gwasg Carreg Gwalch, under its Welsh title Torri Gair ("Breaking the Word"), in 1982. Translations was adapted as a radio play directed by Kirsty Williams, broadcast on BBC Radio 4, on 4 September 2010 (see Translations (radio play)). 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. It was produced by Perla 29. It was performed at the Olivier Theatre from 22 May to 11 August 2018, starring Colin Morgan as Owen and Ciarán Hinds as his father. It was directed by Ian Rickson. 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 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. 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