Have you ever tried picturing translation of the Book of Mormon? Did Joseph Smith read the words off the stone or Urim & Thummim directly (tight translation), or was he shown scenes in the Book of Mormon and used his own words to describe the scene (loose translation)? Mormon scholars are split on this topic, but Jim Lucas and Jonathan Neville will do their best to explain how Joseph used a Urim & Thummim to translate the Book of Mormon. Check out our conversation…
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Picturing Translation (Tight vs Loose)
GT 00:47 Are you guys? Sorry—let’s stick here and then we’ll come back to you about David [Whitmer.] I know, Jonathan, I’ve talked to you before, and you’re a loose translation guy. But there are—
Jonathan 00:54 Yeah, but I don’t frame it in that loose/rigid. I think it’s just a translation. So, I don’t know. It’s a loaded term is what I’m trying to say.
GT 01:07 Because I know Royal Skousen has said the words appeared on the stone.
Jonathan 01:12 Yeah.
GT 01:13 So even if you’re going with Urim and Thummim, would the words have appeared on those crystals?
Jonathan 01:21 Well, this is the second part of this book.
GT 01:23 That’s a tight translation. Royal Skousen’s the only main guy who still believes in tight, although I do have Jay Mackley, who believes in tight.
Jonathan 01:33 Right. So let me just address a little bit. And Jim can address some more of it. The second part of this book talks about the theory of translation. And so, in our view, Joseph Smith himself said that he translated the characters with the Urim and Thummim before he ever did any dictating of a manuscript, and he copied the character so that he could study the actual characters. So, we think he learned the characters. But when you translate an ancient language, a character can have a variety of meetings. Right? Different connotations. And so, we think that the Urim and Thummim was giving him essentially a literal translation of what each character meant. But to put it into English, he had to change the grammar. He had to decide which meaning was most appropriate. That’s why he had to study it out in his mind.
GT 02:20 So your combination, tight-loose?
Jim 02:23 Yes.
Jonathan 02:24 It’s tight in the sense that he was actually translating the engravings on the plates. But it’s not tight in the sense that the Urim and Thummim was telling him what to say.
GT 02:34 So can you imagine? It seems like some of the artists depictions show Joseph— the older stuff, show Joseph wore spectacles. But the problem was the Urim and Thummim, it’s bigger, it’s wider than your head. I don’t know how it would even be used because it’s too big for a normal human.
Jim 02:58 I don’t want I don’t know if you can get tight [with your camera] on the cover illustration. But we worked really hard on the cover illustration.
GT 03:04 Let me zoom in here.
GT 03:09 And if you look at our cover illustration, you see the Urim and Thummim are large. They’re larger. And so this is, as best [as we can illustrate],because there’s not an absolute perfect, this is rock solid description of them. But this is the best we could come up with. And we really worked hard with our artist to come up with this. So, it appears that they were larger than regular spectacles. But they were something that was held in front of the face, either by the rod that was attached to the breastplate; or maybe they were detachable. But they were used more, maybe like a scanner than eyeglasses, because they were by a number of accounts too large to be worn on the face, like a pair of eyeglasses.
GT 04:08 You’re wearing glasses, and you’ve got those side pieces that go to your ears. And there were no side pieces. That’s right, like hold it the whole time or something.
Jonathan 04:17 There was a stem that fit in the breastplate that would hold it.
Jim 04:20 Right, so you could do hands free.
Jonathan 04:21 Another way to consider this is in in the Book Mormon, it says they magnified the eyes of those who used them. And it could be that the people who engraved it had to use them as well. Because Orson Pratt describe these engravings as very fine. And you’re engraving metal with some kind of a tool which would be a difficult thing to do. But if you had a magnification where you could see it, you could do it. And so that’s another element of this. We didn’t. I don’t think we got into that in this book, but I’ve talked about that before.
Jonathan 04:50 Right.
GT 04:11 Okay.
Jonathan 04:52 But you’re right. The description is vague, other than that he said that’s what he used. And he actually says, “by means of the Urim and Thummim.”
Jim 05:05 Or, by the medium of.
Jonathan 05:05 Or by means of. And so that’s why the title is “By means of the Urim and Thummim.” And remember, the subtitle is here is “Restoring Translation to the Restoration.” And that’s because we feel like there’s been this complete dismissal of what Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery said all along from the beginning. That’s why they’re not in the Gospel Topics essay. The various accounts you read in the Saints book or wherever, they just don’t even say what Joseph and Oliver said. And so, there’s room for a variety of interpretations as you said, the tight-loose translation, and so on. But what we’ve proposed, and we’ve given some examples in here, of how you can decipher an ancient character. But to put it in English, you have to use your own language that you have that sort of the Jonathan Edwards material that comes in, and so on. So, Joseph Smith was understanding what the word meant, but he had to pick how to express it.
Jim 06:01 So to get into it, since we’re on it. Basically, our model of the translation is that Joseph would look at the plates through the Urim and Thummim, and the Urim and Thummim would give him a literalistic translation into English, or [in other words] this tight and loose, that’s a Royal Skousen invention. Nobody uses that in translation scholarship. In translation scholarship, the common terms are formal equivalency versus functional equivalency. In formal equivalency, you do a translation that tries to stay really close to the source text, including tracking the grammar and the word order of original text as much as possible, while still being coherent in the target language. Whereas functional equivalency is you’re saying, for example, in the Bible, is saying, I don’t really care how the word order was in Greek or Hebrew. I’m going to express this in a way that is understandable and fluent in my target language: English, or Tagalog, or Swahili or whatever it is. So that’s called functional equivalency. That’s what translation scholarship uses.
Jim 07:24 So our model is basically that Joseph was getting a sort of a literalistic, formal equivalent translation through the Urim and Thummim in English. And then that would give him a feel for the word order that would have the Hebraic word orders and phrases that people say have flowed through into the Book of Mormon. And it gives him a feel for what Nephi or Mormon or Moroni sounded like, or in kind of their original language. But then that would be pretty hard to understand in English, because that would be a very literalistic translation of this very ancient language, Reformed Egyptian or wherever you want to call it. And then what Joseph had to do, D&C 9:8, was study out in his mind, how to express it in English in what translation scholarship would be called functional equivalency. In other words, in something that would make sense to 1820s English native speakers. And that’s what his task was. And that’s what he gave to the scribe to write down. And that’s what he was studying out in his mind. He was getting this kind of literalistic translation off of the Urim and Thummim. And then he had to figure out how to say that in what for him was contemporary English.
Jim 08:53 So that would explain why the Book of Mormon is full of 19th century expressions and language and grammar errors/ It explains why it’s in the King James style. It explains why the Jonathan Edwards and other preachers that Joseph would have been exposed to. it explains why their vocabulary is used in the Book of Mormon and so forth. So, we say that we collapse the tight versus loose dichotomy. In other words, Royal Skousen set up this. And again, it’s just this is just his thing. This is not something you find when you study more broadly the issue of translation scholarship. But his he came up with his tight versus loose because of course, he’s tight. He’s saying, you’ve got exact words off the Urim and Thummim.
GT 09:47 Horses, silk, steel swords, etc. I mean, the problem is, we have all these anachronisms. Horses going to found here. Silk is not found here. Steel swords going to found here. And so it’s nice to say—I mean, Jonathan’s said before, well, he was just using his own language. And so whatever word he was using, he just pulled out horse. That’s where loose is attractive and tight is not attractive. Becase did he actually see the word horse on the Urim and Thummim? I was going to say stone, but Urim and Thummim? I mean, if it’s the most correct book on earth, why is God putting horse and silk and steel swords and elephants and things like that on there if it didn’t exist?
Jim 10:31 Okay, so the advantages of the tight translation is that it explains all the Hebraisms and the odd word orders and all of the minute detail that’s in the Book of Mormon. The advantage of the loose translation is it explains why it sounds like 1820s English and uses all these phrases and words from 1820s English. So, we say that we’ve collapsed the distinction, because Joseph was getting not a tight translation, but he was getting a literalistic translation of the Urim and Thummim. And then he was studying out in his mind a way to express it.
GT 11:15 He would pull out horse and elephant and things like that.
Jim 11:17 Right; in the language that he knew. How could he—any translator can only translate into language that they know. So obviously, when it comes to taking this literalistic translation that the Urim and Thummim was giving him, and then expressing it in some way that’s going to be comprehensible to 1820s Americans, he’s going to use his vocabulary.
GT 11:37 I guess it would similar, I know, in the Bible, I mentioned unicorns, and a lot of people think those are rhinoceroses because clearly they are no unicorns. But I guess it’s kind of like that.
Jonathan 11:46 Well, related to this, too, is we have evidence that Joseph understood that distinction between literal, and the other, because he said the title page was a literal translation. So, he knew what a literal translation was, versus a functional translation. And I’ve done a little analysis of the title page to show how it’s different than the rest of the Book of Mormon. And it’s interesting to see how that could be a literal translation. Whereas the bulk, there are other parts of the Book of Mormon that appear to be a literal translation as well. But most of it is not, apparently. But just the fact that Joseph said, the title page is a literal translation tells us he knew what that meant. And he knew that that was different than the rest of the Book of Mormon. So that’s interesting. That corroborates with what Jim has just been saying.
Jonathan 11:47 Right. So in other words, we’re both. We’re both tight and loose. Our theory can accommodate both tight and loose perceptions. In other words, the advantages or the explanatory power of loose translation and the explanatory power of tight translation, our model of the translation encompasses both of them.
GT 12:56 So you’re both. Okay, that’s interesting.
{End of Part 2}
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