Throughout the course of the play, we witness a slow, simmering anxiety beginning to surface about the English translations of the place names in and around Baile Beag. This process presents a potential problem for the Irish-speaking characters of the play (while all the dialogue is presented in English, the inhabitants of the small Irish town are meant to be speaking in Irish), who sense that the translation of Irish place names into English will result in a subsequent transformation of the way in which they think about and describe both themselves and their home. It's a poignant image of how private realities are always eroded during translation, and how the death of language is accordingly the extinction of a unique conception of the world.

The English are, of course, a continuous presence during the events of the play, although they're not always necessarily viewed by the Irish as antagonists. Indeed, the disruptive presence of the English gradually increases as the play progresses, and it is only at the end, when Yolland's disappearance sparks his comrades' anger, that we see them as potentially dangerous. In many ways, this insidious progression mirrors the gradual progression of the English presence in Ireland, as the colonization of the Irish occurred gradually over many centuries, rather than all at once.