Themis writes:
An example would be the horse/tapir argument. If Nephi and company did call the tapir a horse, then it makes sense that God would not use horse in giving Joseph Smith the translation, since the original author did not mean horse as Joseph's society defined it.
I think this argument doesn't work at all, and it fundamentally misunderstands the problems of translation and language. This is the whole issue behind semantic expansion (or loan shifting). The example I like to use is the one that Umberto Eco uses in his book
Kant and the Platypus. He starts this way:
Often, when faced with an unknown phenomenon, we react by approximation:
we seek that scrap of content, already present in our encyclopedia, which for better or worse seems to account for the new fact. A classic example of this process is to be found in Marco Polo, who saw what we now realize were rhinoceroses on Java. Although he had never seen such animals before, by analogy with other known animals he was able to distinguish the body, the four feet, and the horn. Since his culture provided him with the notion of a unicorn—a quadruped with a horn on its forehead, to be precise—he designated those animals as unicorns.
So, he sees something he hasn't seen before, and fits it into his language using a familiar term. Eco continues:
Then, as he was an honest and meticulous chronicler, he hastened to tell us that these unicorns were rather strange—not very good examples of the species, we might say—given that they were not white and slender but had "the hair of the buffalo" and feet "like the feet of an elephant."
So, this is what we mean by semantic extension. Eco is very much (in his book) interested in talking about why Polo does what he does. But, what we end up with isn't simply a replacement. You couldn't (as you suggest) that we should, when we translate Polo use the word Rhinoceros where Polo uses the word Unicorn. But, this makes part of the text incomprehensible. Polo hasn't replaced one concept with the other, he has added a second concept to the semantic meaning of the word. If he had later seen a slender legged, white, equine looking quadruped with a horn in the middle of its forehead, he would have also recognized this as a unicorn. So, if we see semantic extension going on, then Nephi has used the word horse to refer to whatever he is looking at, he has intended to use that word, and when he uses that word, he also can refer back to all of the other horses of the sort he was previously familiar with. And so its not (at least linguistically) such a simple task as you suggest, and if Nephi does this, a translator restricts Nephi's meaning in a way that conflicts with Nephi's intentions. Certainly, when Nephi quotes Isaiah and presumably uses the same word, he means it in exactly the same way that our culture would generally understand it.
My point of this is that under what we would presume to be similar circumstances, we find identifiable, non-fictional parallel events happening in other texts - parallel to what we suppose might have happened here. As to why it occurred (which is part of what preoccupies Eco in his book), we could come up with a number of potentially rational reasons depending on our candidates for the semantic extension.
But, because of this, I don't accept your rationale. Perhaps if you would do a better job of explaining what sort of translation you would expect, how it would work, and so on, we might have some room to discuss this. But I recognize this is a problematic issue from your perspective that there was in fact no translation occurring.
Not to mention that the Book of Mormon uses some names for animals we have no idea what they are.
Right, but they occur in a specific context where we have Moroni providing us with a translation (which potentially he did not make) of a much older text, and he may not have had any idea what they were. Ether is a challenging text because of what it tells us about its origins (unlike much of the rest of the Book of Mormon), and so it carries additional problems in the context of a discussion like this.
With Joseph as reader, then it is supposed to be a translation of an ancient text.
Sure, which is what I keep saying. But it isn't an ancient text, is it. It's language is at home in early 19th century America. It is in English. These are not features of an ancient text. The Bible, for example, contains anachronistic language. But that doesn't mean that there isn't an ancient text as its source. Nor does it make the KJV of the Bible an ancient text (beyond the date of its creation). With the Book of Mormon, this is a distinction that often gets missed. In biblical studies you would be hard pressed to find any scholar who mistakes the KJV for an ancient text.
Ben M.