Is using MySQL views a good translation mechanism?
Views are a good way to accomplish what you want to do. If your views take advantage of existing indexes or are 1:1 against the underlying tables, then queries against them will use the indexes. Since you're expecting periodic updates, you'll want to script the view creation, and in that same deployment script you can always add indexes if you need more.

You will want a 1:1 view of the columns for each table that simply performs the translation on the column and table names, enabling updates and inserts on those views in your locale. If the database contains stored procedures, you can create wrappers for them in your native language by adding new procedures to accept translated parameters and call the original procedures.

One caveat is the collation used by the database: if it is not suitable for your locale, using COLLATE to a different character set in your SQL statements will negatively impact performance.