Swapping Escape key and backtick key in all modes

Question

I'm using Emacs 27.2 (2021-07-22) and for years have mapped Escape to Backtick key (Ok, I did this after the industry moved the Escape key to the location it is in now, next to F1).

The keyboard I have matches this diagram:

The lisp code I use to do the swapping is:

(keyboard-translate ?\` ?\e)  ; Make backquote behave as escape
(keyboard-translate ?\e ?\`)  ; Make escape work as backtick // THIS DOESN'T WORK

This works for the backtick, but doesn't change the mapping for the escape key.

After the above,

1. When I press the backtick key, emacs acts as if the Escape key were pressed.
2. When I press the Escape key, emacs acts as if the Escape key were pressed.

What is the right way to swap the Escape and Backtick keys? Only inside of emacs. Also, I don't want to remap my keyboard in my Windows or Linux OS, I've done this in the past and it causes problems with KVMs (mostly this was with mapping CapsLock to Control).

NOTE: My work around is to define a function to insert a backtick and map that to another key sequence.

(defun insert-backtick (&optional arg )
  (interactive)
  (insert ?\`))

Answer 1

The ESC key has along with C- and M- in Emacs the special status of being a prefix key, so that the translation from key to key does not work.

Check out: How to remove bindings to the ESC prefix key and try:

(define-key key-translation-map (kbd "ESC") (kbd "`"))

( tested to work OK with Emacs 29 on Linux Mint 21 Cinnamon )

I assume that this above takes directly the keypress to re-map it instead of 'waiting' for a key code resulting from an interpreted keypress-combination.