WHEN Bill Findlay died on May 15, he left an enormous legacy to Scotland. For a quarter of a century, he worked both as a translator and critic and made an unparalleled and unique contribution to Scottish theatre.

Born the fifth of six children in Culross, Fife, Bill attended Dunfermline High School and left home in 1965 to begin work as a civil servant in London. He returned to Scotland in 1970 to attend Newbattle Abbey College, spending two years there before going on to Stirling University, where he graduated with a first class honours degree in English in 1976.

Bill and I met in Edinburgh in 1978 when we were both postgraduate students at Edinburgh University. Professor John MacQueen, my adviser at the School of Scottish Studies, suggested that I should meet the other student who was researching John Galt, the Scottish novelist and Canadian colonist.

That student was Bill Findlay.

What drew us together then was our shared interest in the Scots language.

We met on a November evening and walked about Edinburgh, settling finally to a meal at the Falcon Pub in Bruntsfield. It was at our very first meeting that the project to translate Quebec plays into Scots began. We talked that night about language and national identity in Scotland and Quebec. Bill asked me if there was a play we might translate from Quebecois French into Scots. I said there was, and we set about to translate Michel Tremblay's ground-breaking play, Les Belles-Soeurs, which we called The Guid Sisters.

Although an excerpt was published in Cencrastus, the Scottish literary magazine that Bill co-founded in 1979, the play languished in the offices of Scottish theatres until 1987, when Tom McGrath presented a reading at the Edinburgh Fringe. Professor Ian Lockerbie of Stirling University then invited Bill and myself to speak about the translation at a conference on Theatre and Cinema in Scotland and Quebec. As a result, Michael Boyd, then director of the Tron Theatre, mounted a production at Mayfest in 1989, the first of many to come.

"Bill found a release and a voice for himself in the work of Michel Tremblay and in return, he gave Tremblay his finest voice outside francophonie, " said Boyd.

"In the process, Scotland gained a major playwright, and a renewed confidence in its own indigenous theatrical vocabulary."

Between 1989 and 2003, eight Scots Tremblays were produced at such theatres as the Tron, the Traverse, Perth Theatre and the Royal Lyceum. It was a source of great pride to Bill that these Scots translations travelled to London, Long Island, Toronto, and, most wonderfully, to Montreal, where the Tron's production of The Guid Sisters went home to play at the Centaur Theatre as part of the city's 350th anniversary celebrations. Two of these plays, The House among the Stars and Solemn Mass for a Full Moon in Summer, had greater success in Scotland than in Quebec. John Linklater, then at The Herald, wrote of The House among the Stars: "This play speaks intimately to the Scottish soul."

Bill and I translated three other Quebec plays, one of which, Jeanne-Mance Delisle's The Reel of the Hanged Man, was produced by Stellar Quines in 2000. Additionally, Bill adapted a number of other plays into Scots, among them Gerhart Hauptmann's The Weavers, a co-production of Dundee Rep and Glasgow Tramway.

Bill was awarded his PhD in 2000 and held a readership in the School of Drama and Creative Industries, Queen Margaret University College, Edinburgh. His contribution to Scottish theatre studies was substantial. He edited and contributed the first chapter to The History of Scottish Theatre (1998). He also edited Scots Plays of the Seventies (2001), Frae Ither Tongues: Essays on Modern Translations into Scots (2004) , and (with John Corbett) Serving Twa Maisters: An Anthology of Scots Translations of Classic Plays, which was published on May 20 as the annual volume of the Association of Scottish Literary Studies.

Bill had an encyclopaedic knowledge of and a passionate interest in all aspects of Scottish culture, but he never failed to look beyond national boundaries to understand and interpret the Scottish experience. This is most evident in his theatre translations where he exploded the myth that Scots language can only be used to present a Scottish world. He demonstrated the capacity of the language to go beyond the particularities of Scottish life to embody the common human experience.

He is survived by his wife, Jessica Burns, and his daughters, Hannah and Martha.

Bill Findlay, translator and scholar; born June 11, 1947, died May 15, 2005.