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Royal Skousen’S Lecture

Jude2

By Jude2
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J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted (edited)

guerreiro9,

Thanks for your patience. While most of your views simply boil down to what you believe without any real evidence to the contrary, I would take exception to a few ideas here:

"And it came to pass" and if/and conditionals are both examples of translating literally the structure of a phrase from the source language to the target language. ("And it came to pass" is actually not limited in the KJV text but rather prevalent.) Given this, why would a lack of its use among English language publications not translated from the same language or its lack among Joseph's other writings in English not translated from the same language be evidence that Joseph wasn't involved in the word choice?

While Royal does acknowledge the dependence of the BoM on KJV language, he doesn't address the issue of why certain italicized words are treated in a certain way in the BoM translation and how that treatment has a direct relationship to how they are translated in the Bible project and what Joseph's role is in both of them. Is there a connecction? What is it and what part does Joseph play?

I don't agree with Royal's assessment that Joseph's editing of the 1830 edition shows he was uncomfortable with a large portion of the phrasing and that this points to Joseph as reader. Again, Royal only provides a very limited data set and the limited data he does provide are not convincing in terms of excluding Joseph as the author who is later reading as an editor. To me, the same very limited data Royal presents fit the profile of many beginning translators in my experience. He also does not address the very many instances that changes are made that don't fit this profile. He uses a small set of evidence and excludes the data that don't fit the profile.

Aside from this, we can certainly agree to disagree about what the evidence shows.

Cheers

Edited by J Green
Calm Grand Master

Calm

Posted
Posted
I don't agree with Royal's assessment that Joseph's editing of the 1830 edition shows he was uncomfortable with a large portion of the phrasing and that this points to Joseph as reader. 

 

Do we know how much Joseph was prone to edit things he was the author of?  Such as sermons that were later published?

J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted

407 hits on "and it came to pass" 

If I remember right, there are three or four times that many variants of the Hebrew.

Cheers

1
J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted (edited)

Do we know how much Joseph was prone to edit things he was the author of? Such as sermons that were later published?

I'm not familiar with a lot of that kind of material. I am working through the Joseph Smith Papers revelations, and he seems to have made a lot of edits there, including reworking the material based on added inspiration.

Edited by J Green
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guerreiro9 Community Regular

guerreiro9

Posted
Posted (edited)

guerreiro9,

Thanks for your patience. While most of your views simply boil down to what you believe without any real evidence to the contrary, I would take exception to a few ideas here:

"And it came to pass" and if/and conditionals are both examples of translating literally the structure of a phrase from the source language to the target language. ("And it came to pass" is actually not limited in the KJV text but rather prevalent.) Given this, why would a lack of its use among English language publications not translated from the same language or its lack among Joseph's other writings in English not translated from the same language be evidence that Joseph wasn't involved in the word choice?

While Royal does acknowledge the dependence of the BoM on KJV language, he doesn't address the issue of why certain italicized words are treated in a certain way in the BoM translation and how that treatment has a direct relationship to how they are translated in the Bible project and what Joseph's role is in both of them. Is there a connecction? What is it and what part does Joseph play?

I don't agree with Royal's assessment that Joseph's editing of the 1830 edition shows he was uncomfortable with a large portion of the phrasing and that this points to Joseph as reader. Again, Royal only provides a very limited data set and the limited data he does provide are not convincing in terms of excluding Joseph as the author who is later reading as an editor. To me, the same very limited data Royal presents fit the profile of many beginning translators in my experience. He also does not address the very many instances that changes are made that don't fit this profile. He uses a small set of evidence and excludes the data that don't fit the profile.

Aside from this, we can certainly agree to disagree about what the evidence shows.

Cheers

 

Hello J Green,
 
I appreciate your response.  I am not as tied to Royal's theories as I may have led you to believe, but I still think he has provided more observable evidence.  Where other theories have "it could happen" and "it's possible that" Royal has numbers and statistics, that is very appealing to one of my profession (science/engineering).  I am enjoying this conversation and would like to learn more about your ideas.  Hopefully I am not becoming a pesky gnat you would like to swat away.
 
The area that I struggle accepting with the "Joseph as the source of the wording" theory is exactly what you mentioned in your previous post, where the translation appears to be a "literal" translation from another language.  I speak a few foreign languages (I'm on my 4th, but some are stronger than others) so I am quite familiar with the difference between a word for word translation and a translation that conveys the meaning from one language to another (I believe this is what you refer to as "tight" and "loose").  What we have in the Book of Mormon does not fit either of these two extremes, but appears to slide back and forth between them.
 
I can understand and accept a translation where Joseph was somehow made to understand the meaning of the Book of Mormon text, and then was given freedom to convey this meaning in English using the words and phrases at his disposal.  This would mirror translations where the translator understands both languages well, and is therefore able to translate the meaning of the text, ignoring the actual word structure.  In some places in the Book of Mormon this explanation works well, and there are phrases that people point to as evidence of this. 
 
In other portions of the Book of Mormon this does not work well at all.  It appears to be (as you implied above) a "literal" translation from one language to another.  So let's examine how this process could have worked.  If God provided Joseph with the wording of the Book of Mormon, God (or whomever he delegated to perform the translation) would have been familiar with both the original language of the Book of Mormon and English.  They would have been able to convey the meaning of the text from one language to another, but when needed they also would have been able to convey the structure of the text from one language to another.  I am not sure why God would have chosen to do this, but a lot of study has gone into showing that there are many grammatical structures in the Book of Mormon that are out of place in English, but are common in Hebrew.
 
If Joseph was responsible for formulating the words, he would have had to understand the structure of a language he had never read, heard, or spoken.  Just understanding the meaning of the words would not have been enough, he would have had to understand the meaning and understand how you would have conveyed that meaning in the original language of the Book of Mormon.  In naive translations this is accomplished by means of a dictionary.  You go through each word one at a time and translate that word into the desired language.  The structure of the original language is provided by the original author, and this structure is preserved during the translation, but the translation is horrible and does not convey the original meaning.  How would the structure of an unknown language have been conveyed to Joseph?  The meaning of the text could have been conveyed to him, because the meaning is universal and independent of the Language chosen to render it.  A lot of the "Hebrew-like" grammatical structures in the Book of Mormon boil down to placing an "and" in places that we would not normally find it.  How would you convey to someone an understanding of the grammatical structure of a unknown language such that when translating that Language the original meaning and structure would be maintained by slightly modifying a common English phrase through the use of the word "and".  Doesn't it seem more likely and consistent that he was given the word "and"?
 
What are your thoughts?
 
-guerreiro9 
Edited by guerreiro9
Calm Grand Master

Calm

Posted
Posted (edited)

Hello calmoriah,

 

Would you be able to run the same search on the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon?  I am curious to see where the numbers lie.

 

Thanks!

 

-guerreiro9

So far haven't been able to make it work, most online sites are photocopies pictures, the ones that are searchable text split the chapter so I have to use "find" and if they have more than 100 hits, "find" stops counting...

 

Whatever it is, it is over 1297.  Apparently JS removed at least 46.

 

http://www.cometozarahemla.org/hebraisms/hebraisms.html#_1_2

Edited by calmoriah
guerreiro9 Community Regular

guerreiro9

Posted
Posted (edited)

So far haven't been able to make it work, most online sites are photocopies pictures, the ones that are searchable text split the chapter so I have to use "find" and if they have more than 100 hits, "find" stops counting...

 

Whatever it is, it is over 1297.  Apparently JS removed at least 46.

 

http://www.cometozarahemla.org/hebraisms/hebraisms.html#_1_2

 

Thank you calmoriah!  Would you happen to be able to pull the total word count from the Bible selection you scanned and also from the Book of Mormon selection you scanned?

 

I am just curious about relative frequency of the use of the phrase.  I don't necessarily think this proves anything one way or another, but I do think it is interesting.

 

-guerreiro9

 

edited to add,

 

I misunderstood, I thought that whatever you had done had stopped at 1297, but after following your link I see that is where the number came from.  If anyone is able to find out how many times it is used in the 1830 addition of the Book of Mormon I would be interested to know.

Edited by guerreiro9
J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted (edited)

guerreiro9,

No pesky gnats from my viewpoint. I love this stuff. My own degree is in translation and I've worked on translation issues for the last twenty years in the military as part of a linguist unit that performs translations in over 40 languages for both DOJ and DOD agencies. Among other things, I've produced translations for court cases, and in 2003 in Iraq I helped design, setup and run the massive translation project (still ongoing) to comb through the regime's holdings.

Like DavidT, I also highly recommend Brant's book on the translation process. It will help put some of these issues in perspective and give a sort of left and right limit for your own ideas. Brant does a better job than anyone I know in setting up the context. He address the culture of the seer and diviner in New England at that time and the friction between urban and rural views on this. He then looks at how stories become sacred within religious cultures. The book is priceless simply for these chapters alone.

Where I agree with Brant is in the large picture of Joseph's involvement of the process. He concurs with most of Royal's data but has a different interpretation of the data.

Where I disagree with Brant is more in the calibration of the translation itself. All of us appear to agree that the BoM translation slides on a continuum between literal and less literal at various times. Yet Brant feels that the majority of the translation is a product of a functional equivalency--essentially a middle portion of that spectrum. From his perspective, the underlying structure of the source language is mostly not translated. Thus, I think Brant would be rather sympathetic to your question about how Joseph could possibly retain any Hebraic structure in his translation if he were merely receiving an idea and then articulating that idea in his own words. (Brant sometimes posts here, so hopefully he'll leave us some thoughts.) Brant then addresses some of the very work that you mention, to include chiasms, if-and conditionals and other proposed evidence of underlying source language structure. I won't present the evidence here but rather encourage you to read these chapters to understand how he goes through some of the same questions you do in the context of Royal's data. It's a must read for anyone interested in this discussion and it allows us to frame the debate in terms of good arguments from both sides.

If you were to diagram a spectrum with loose and tight on either end and Brant's functional equivalency thesis in the middle, my own opinion has the majority of the BoM text as a product of something just a little past center on the literal side. I certainly think that there are portions that reflect a loose translation, but I believe the majority of the text falls into a part of the spectrum that is a bit more on the literal side than Brant proposes. This part of the spectrum would retain portions of the underlying structure of the source language and therefore be more friendly to some of the data you mention.

Why do I believe this? Mostly because I've worked in the field of translation for so long that I believe that the text I see before me fits the exact profile of something I saw every day -- a text that is not overly literal but literal enough to retain elements of the underlying source language structure. For ten years I did this daily on documents for court, both producing them myself and editing the work of others. If you do it frequently, you start to get a feel for when the translated text comes from the idiomatic structure of the original language and when it doesn't. And I don't think that the KJV language accounts for all of this phenomenon in the BoM. As we progress in the discussion we could look at specific examples and flesh out some of these ideas.

But because I believe that some of the underlying structure is preserved, the questions you ask are valid and on point, whereas Brant's thesis would withdraw from most of the underlying structure debate by positing a less overtly literal translation. So I'll try to answer your questions from a idea perspective (we can start looking at examples as we go along), but I'll do that in a separate post. I'll leave this one for more of a background and context wash, and the next post will add a layer of detail in terms of the main subject.

Cheers

Edited by J Green
J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted (edited)

Most people will start an analysis by identifying things they know and things they assume. These act as a type of screening criteria that will both assist in drawing conclusions but also point out possible branch-sequel errors in the case of mistaken assumptions. From that perspective, if we were to add the evidence for underlying structure in the translation as one of the assumptions (and not facts) that will play a part in our analysis, then to a certain extent, the question of Joseph as translator or an earlier personage as translator is sort of the same question. If the underlying structure shows up in the translation, does that demonstrate that the translator knows both languages? Joseph certainly doesn't know the language of the source text. But how far back in time do you have to go to find someone who does? When you do go back that far, can you really expect that individual to also know the future English of the translation? Or is it a resurrected Nephite like Moroni himself who apparently can address Joseph in Joseph's own dialect and language? If it's someone like Moroni, is he also performing this role for other translation projects like the Book of Abraham? When did he perform the translation? Or is God himself the translator?

I have not worked through all of these questions enough to propose a thesis as firmly as both Royal and Brant, but if I were to do so, it would be something like the following:

Phase I - Cultural Context

Joseph had spiritual gifts that were developed within the culture of the village seer. He could use a stone to see lost objects (in his mind's eye through the medium of the stone). This gift was developed in a mostly visual culture -- i.e., my horse is stolen, where is it? It's over by this lake. Etc. His gift -- like our own spiritual gifts -- was only limited by his own cultural beliefs about the extent of that gift. For example, Dominicans believe that God speaks to them through dreams. And he does because that is the way their faith is primed. As a missionary there, many of my investigators saw me in a dream before I met them. The Saints of Joseph's day had a cultural belief in speaking in tongues based on NT revival literature. Thus you see examples of that in the early restoration. You don't see that anymore, not because it isn't possible but because this is not the way our faith is constructed culturally now. For those whose faith is constructed to only ask God yes-no questions or ask for professional direction by closing the opportunities when it is time to move on, then this is how their faith is answered, because God works within the limits of faith we set for ourselves, and some of these are artificial cultural constructs. Joseph's gift is mostly a visual one. He can see objects, including the words on texts that are physically behind another person or in a different city (based on early sources).

Phase II - Transition to Religious Translator

Brant treats this subject very well -- better than I could ever do. But essentially the visions and plates put Joseph into a position where he needs to transition his gift to a more purely religious realm. He is given the interpreters and the plates and has them for almost two years before he really gets serious about translating the BoM. His culturally constructed faith is more visually attuned -- close enough to the task at hand to feel he can try this with God's help, but far enough away to have doubts about what he produces. And there are plenty of other temporal distractions to deal with. Finally, however, with Emma as scribe, he traces characters from the plates on a piece of paper (or parchment), places the interpreters over these characters, then writes down the interpretation in English. (This is essentially how we get the 116 pages.) But at some point, he is looking for some validation about his product and he sends a sample out to be looked at by the learned of his day. His mother tells us that he was hoping to get enough feedback to create a kind of dictionary that would enable him to finish the translation through these means. (We see this idea of creating a dictionary later with the BOA; see also Don Bradley's piece on Joseph's use of the dictionary in the Kinderhook plates incident.) Joseph is producing a translation, but he is not confident about his work. There are likely a few issues here: The first is that the process is not as visual as he is used to. And the second is that he is not as comfortable with the interpreters as the culturally-constructed mechanism of faith-based second site. His cultural background as village seer would have placed great importance on the stone itself. You were essentially paired with a stone, and other stones may not work for you or any other seer. I think this was a big deal for Joseph at this stage in his spiritual progression.

Phase III - Gifts Enlarged

Up until now, Joseph has mostly been on the receiving end of revelation. He is visited by personages as a result of prayer, but he doesn't have a history or pattern of receiving revelation on demand. This changes with the loss of the 116 pages. We now get some of the earliest revelations in the D&C. Now Joseph starts asking for and receiving direct instructions and details on very specific questions. His culturally-constructed faith enlarges. His confidence in receiving revelation on demand grows, much as a priesthood holder who gives many blessings grows in confidence to receive promptings on behalf of others. At this point two things happen: Joseph returns to the translation with more confidence in receiving non-visual revelation, but at the same time he starts using his own stone in a way that would move the same process he used earlier into a more visual realm. Although his faith has been enlarged, he is playing to the strengths of his spiritual gift. Thus he now chooses to see in the stone the same process he used with the 116 pages. He sees a character from the plates written on a paper or parchment (which he did earlier) and then he sees the interpretation in English he previously would have written by the characters he traced.

I also believe that the gift and power of God in this process actually allowed Joseph to understand the source language (even though he didn't of his own power) just like you and I would understand the thoughts and ideas from a foreign language text. I believe this for several reasons, some of which comes from similar themes that appear to run through the BOA experience, his sermons based on his Hebrew lessons with Seixas, and other events. Joseph is the common factor here in these events, and I believe that the translated product demonstrates portions of the underlying source language. Ergo, Joseph through God's power, understood the language of the Plates in a very similar way that you and I would understand an idea as we read it in another language. That is, we understand the idea within the construct of the original language. This does not mean Joseph knew reformed Egyptian/Hebrew on his own but simply that God gave understanding in the context of the original language.

Thus I would answer your question that the underlying structure is often showing up slightly because Joseph is essentially doing the same thing you and I would do in translating from a language we know. The only difference is that Joseph doesn't really know this language. He is spiritually given an understanding of it in its original source language context and then needs to transfer the idea into English, resulting in a translation that often retains a patina of the source structure. But because this is a spiritual gift and not from his own learning, he spiritually needs to study and pray about the choices he is making and his understanding of the text (D&C 9).

Edited by J Green
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J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted (edited)

Sorry for the length of these posts. A few more thoughts:

The visual nature of Joseph's early gift is an important part of the process I'm sketching here. Since I believe that the other phases presented (particularly the portion during the 116 pages) demonstrate a Joseph who is part of the translation, then what is the idea behind the English text that is seen in the stone? I feel it is simply a visual replica of the process used earlier -- trace characters, write the interpretation thereof. His is a visual faith. And so he sees the ideas he is articulating as he translates, just as he used to write the ideas down by the traced characters. It is the exact same process he used earlier -- tracing a character and writing down a translation -- but moved entirely into the visual faith construct with which he is comfortable. He simply sees that process in the stone.

Second, when Joseph recognized portions of scripture (and many of these are introduced through verbal cues), he simply went to the KJV version of the passages in question but likely did so visually through the stone. If the witness statements are to be believed, he didn't have any other texts with him during the translation. Just as he could choose to see the location of a lost horse or read from the words of a book in another city through the stone as a village seer, I believe he could simply desire to see the text of the KJV biblical passages he identified through either verbal cues in the text or through his own familiarity with the scriptures. I believe that there are other citations that he did not recognize and thus do not bear the imprint of the KJV text (and thus are harder to identify).

It's late, and I'm likely forgetting other aspects of this, so I may add more in the next few days. However, one of the things I would like to point out is that earlier I had made a list of a few of the reasons why I believe Joseph participated in the process. Other reasons would really delve into larger subjects like the BOA process, the Bible translation, and other events. I think some of the themes and choices bear similarities and that Joseph is the common denominator for all of these versus simply being the dictator of multiples texts translated by other individuals.

But one of the biggest reasons I believe that Joseph was part of the process is his early work as a village seer combined with the events during the 116 pages. The real tragedy is that we as Saints have tended to shy away from exploring the background and nature of Joseph's work as a seer and his use of the stone. I believe this data would give us valuable insight into Joseph's culturally-constructed faith and how both the possibilities as well as self-imposed limitations of that gift transitioned a village seer into a young prophet attempting revelatory translation through interpreters that were similar to his seer stone and his subsequent shift back to the stone to maintain the same process in a visual framework. When we as a Church grow more comfortable exploring this aspect of Joseph's training, I think a lot of fruitful insights can be had that relate to the translation of the Book of Mormon and other events in the restoration. If truth really springs from the earth, then Joseph's early work as a village seer was apt and timely training for a young translator in embryo.

Thoughts?

Cheers

Edited by J Green
1
Brant Gardner Mentor

Brant Gardner

Posted
Posted

Where I disagree with Brant is more in the calibration of the translation itself. All of us appear to agree that the BoM translation slides on a continuum between literal and less literal at various times. Yet Brant feels that the majority of the translation is a product of a functional equivalency--essentially a middle portion of that spectrum. From his perspective, the underlying structure of the source language is mostly not translated. Thus, I think Brant would be rather sympathetic to your question about how Joseph could possibly retain any Hebraic structure in his translation if he were merely receiving an idea and then articulating that idea in his own words. (Brant sometimes posts here, so hopefully he'll leave us some thoughts.) Brant then addresses some of the very work that you mention, to include chiasms, if-and conditionals and other proposed evidence of underlying source language structure. I won't present the evidence here but rather encourage you to read these chapters to understand how he goes through some of the same questions you do in the context of Royal's data. It's a must read for anyone interested in this discussion and it allows us to frame the debate in terms of good arguments from both sides.

 

This seems to be the most frequent misunderstanding of what I thought I wrote (obviously, people are reading what I wrote differently than my intention, and that is my fault--darn it). My interest in defining a particular relationship between the plate text and the translation text is to be able to discern how closely the translated text replicates what is on the plate text. Particularly in terms of vocabulary and idioms, I think there is sufficient data to tell us that there cannot be a universally assumed literalist translation (similar to a "tight" translation). I do see a very literalist translation with the names, so I agree with those who suggest that there is more than one method at work. My point is that if we cannot demonstrate a reason to support the literalist translation, the safest position bolstered by the majority of the data, is that it is functional.

 

Of course there is functional and there is functional. Even in that concept there are degrees of distance from the source text. I think those degrees of difference also fluctuate, allowing from important replication of authentically ancient and culturally foreign content to times when the translation text owes its vocabulary to modern idiom (and borrowed KJV language).

 

But because I believe that some of the underlying structure is preserved, the questions you ask are valid and on point, whereas Brant's thesis would withdraw from most of the underlying structure debate by positing a less overtly literal translation.  

 

Actually, I do believe that structure can be preserved even when vocabulary is functional. There is a section in the book where I talk about structures surviving the translation process. I don't think they necessarily come through unscathed, but they are there. For example, while the form of "and it came to pass" is likely borrowed from the KJV, the function of the phrase can be discerned. It is not a random addition tossed in for "flavor."

 

J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted

This seems to be the most frequent misunderstanding of what I thought I wrote (obviously, people are reading what I wrote differently than my intention, and that is my fault--darn it).

Brant,

Thanks for stopping by, and please don't apologize for my errors in comprehension. I even finished your book for a second time recently, so I have no excuse except my own errors.

I agree with what you have stated here. The translation process is indeed a continuum with many degrees along its path of travel. Any thoughts on the rest of the conversation?

Regards

omni Mentor

omni

Posted
Posted

Brant and J Green,

I'm curious if in your experiences translating it is common for you to see both characteristics of a "loose" and "tight" translation in one document?

Thanks,

J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted (edited)

My opinion:

After a little bit of experience, most translators start to develop a methodology that creates a type of consistency within their work. The exception is the beginner. Those who are very new at translation will almost always tend toward the overly literal in their translations but also be a little erratic. There really isn't any method to the swings. They're figuring it out. But those who have a little practice tend to be more consistent and develop opinions about transferring ideas. So with these individuals you see a lot of consistency but many times with a bit of a difference during parts of their translations, as you suggest. The reasons I've seen for the swings might be one of the following:

1. A portion of the text is different.

Translators get into a rhythm based on the continued flow of the text. You'll see a consistency about the translation until something new pops up in the text, which may be cited passages from another work or a switch in dialect or anything that is different than the norm of the text. Often I would see a translator be toward the middle of the spectrum but treat anomalies within the text overly literally, or vice versa. It's human nature to react to new things a little differently than we usually do. A few years ago the military paid for me to attend a course at the Harvard Kennedy Center Extension with a lot of the first responders (FEMA, hospital administrators, fire chiefs, etc.) where we studied why we react differently under stress of new situations. It's just part of our makeup to change under stress. Good translators will edit and re-edit to try to smooth these things over, but barring that, we're stuck with being who we are.

2. The text is quite long.

One time early on in my career I was working on a team that was translating the Mexican penal code for the US Congress. Dry stuff, and very long. I noticed that as the worked progressed over weeks that the style had shifted slightly. This is the same phenomenon as writing a long text or research paper and starting to shift emphasis as you get further along. The more you dive into a complex issue and really understand meanings and connections between things, the more you start to shift your thinking and that reflects in the translation as well. One of my translation professors translated novels and poetry and talked about how with a short poem you would think it through all together and then translate it in all one style, but that with novels, as he got further into the work he would shift styles slightly as he understood connections. The trick is recognizing it and deciding what to do about it.

Edited by J Green
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J Green Community Regular

J Green

Posted
Posted

Application:

I believe that JS would have mostly worked through beginning translator issues during the 116 pages. I think he shows more confidence and practice as he starts the text we currently have. He's still a beginner but I would expect to see more consistency with occasional swings based issues such as the ones presented above.

The BoM text would present opportunities for both elements suggested above (as well as the obvious one when you are simply copying something that someone else translated, i.e. KJV passages). I think there could have been instances within a long verse that would have been unusual (idiomatic phrases) as well as separate verses. There is also the issue of the length of the text. Did Joseph shift styles at all during the course of the translation, and does the text support that? Is the language of the Hebrew/reformed Egyptian the same over the years, or does it switch around or change at all? This might have another impact on the translation style. I've never tried to pull together all the instances of tight, loose, and in between and try to correlate them to see what kind of pattern emerges. It would be an interesting study.

Regards

Robert F. Smith Grand Master

Robert F. Smith

Posted
Posted

........................................................................   

"Loose" = Joseph formulated the English words of the Book of Mormon somehow.

"Tight" = The English words of the Book of Mormon were given to Joseph somehow.

....................................................................   

 

Some specific examples that I believe indicate he saw the English language text and read it to his scribes are:

  1. The excessive use of "and it came to pass".  I have not seen any examples of its use in 19th century America, and its use in the KJV is limited.  Joseph does not appear to have used this phrase excessively in any of his other writings, and removed a number of them from the text during the editorial process.
  2. Use of the "if, and" conditional structure.  Likewise does not appear to be used in 19th century America and is not used in the KJV.

If these we used just once or twice throughout the Book, I think it would be more plausible that Joseph Smith formulated the text.  They were not though, they were used continuously and consistently indicating that they were a preferred grammatical structure for transmitting the desired meaning.

 

What sentences and phrases do you think are indicative of Joseph formulating the text based upon words of his choosing?

 

-guerreiro9

Thanks, guerreiro,
(I tried to get this reply in last nite, but the whole system went down)
A very literal and wooden translation (which some might call "tight") could be rendered by simply providing non-idiomatic dictionary definition equivalents, without regard to the intention of the original author.
Likewise, a dynamic equivalence or metaphrase (which some might term "loose") could be offered, and that is what professional, modern translators provide.  It is the most accurate type of translation.
Such methods of translation may also be mixed, and even conditioned by a tendency to use a high or low vocabulary, depending on the target audience.
The more literal translations often convey the grammatical structure of the original language from which translated (some then find "if...and" constructions, etc., to provided evidence of Hebrew as the original language).
 
The use of "it came to pass" in the Book of Mormon appears at the very same rate it does in biblical narrative material, as I showed over thirty years ago in my “’It Came To Pass’ in the Bible and the Book of Mormon,” FARMS Preliminary Report SMI-80b (Provo: FARMS, 1980/updated 1981, 1983); online at http://www.scribd.com/lighthorseharry/d/39997996-It-Came-to-Pass-in-the-Bible-and-Book-of-Mormon ; enhanced version and special charts online at http://premormon.com/resources/r003/003Smith.pdf .
 
I think that Joseph's contemporary vocabulary was adequate to the task of translation, although I posit that there was a feedback loop through his mind, and considerable inspiration.  I think that God preselected Joseph for the task due to his character and openness to revelation.  Otherwise any fool "talking dog" would have been as good (perhaps better) at reading pretranslation copy...
 
Robert F. Smith Grand Master

Robert F. Smith

Posted
Posted

I don't fault the textual criticism elements of Royal's work. They are top notch. But I do fault his interpretation of that textual criticism when applied to the translation process. Off the top of my head, a few things with which I take issue:

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Your thoughts?

Cheers

Excellent summary of the issues and likely solutions. Thanks.

See my comments for guerreiro, for some of my perspectives.

Brant Gardner Mentor

Brant Gardner

Posted
Posted

Did Joseph shift styles at all during the course of the translation, and does the text support that?

 

I think there is some evidence of certain types of stylistic changes. The therefore/wherefore shift can be demonstrated and I think is pretty clearly an aspect of the translator's style rather than the text. In other cases, it is difficult to know if perceived stylistic changes are due to the shift in the plate text source or the translator. Some of them, I believe can be traced to the plate text. Nephi's style owes more to Nephi than Joseph in spite of our dependence on English for the text itself.

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