Are you tight or loose - translatory speaking?

[_Themis]

Hi, Themis.

LDS Apologetics is not a monolithic group, and there are very divergent views among them about the translation process. Thus, not all LDS apologists actually believe that what you say they do (i.e., that a tight translation automatically means that Joseph simply dictated a text mechanically). And to the extent that I'm considered an apologists, you're actually conversing with one who doesn't believe it.

Cheers.

That's fine, and as I said somewhat irrelevant, but I do think most define it this way even if you do not. It makes for easier discussion anyways if we have definitions agreed upon, or at least known. Otherwise if someone is using it differently we will not know what one is trying to say.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Drifting writes:

Well, without the plates in play one is left with the assumption that God chose to leave the repitition in. He didn't need to. He could have corrected it and thus removed one source of criticism.

The problem with this, Drifting, is that it makes assumptions about God. And what we end up with couldn't really be called a translation. At this point, the discussion would make such a left turn that we wouldn't be able to really make any progress. And your comments would be all about what you assume God would or wouldn't do as opposed to talking about the text and what the text might contribute to any discussion about translation.

So, given this, let me ask you five questions about your assumptions:

1: Is God more of an idea-for-idea kind of translator or a word-for-word kind of translator?
2: Assuming that God knows the thoughts of all mankind (past, present, and potentially future), does God translate to the intentions of the author, or would he translate what the author actually wrote? Or would God actually provide what God wanted independent of both the intentions of an author and what that author actually wrote?
3: What role, in a translation made by God, does the response of His audience play? That is, how does God choose the idealized audience that he is going to prepare the translation for?
4: There are often rhetorical figures used in texts. Some of them can affect translation. One of those is a Hebrew figure termed a Janus parallelism. The text uses an ambiguous word in between two statements such that it means one thing in the context of the statement made before the word, and another thing in the statement made after it. How does God translate this?
5: One of the rhetorical figures we find in texts is the literary allusion, where an author refers us to another text to add meaning and intention. We can speak of incompetent readers being readers who do not know the source that being alluded to, and so who cannot arrive at the meaning intended by an author. With the Book of Mormon, we potentially have many sources that get alluded to - which, because we do not have the source, we simply could never become competent readers. Howe would God translate such an allusion?

Edit: Perhaps you could also address the assumption that God is interested in removing sources of criticism.

Ben M.

[_Drifting]

Drifting writes:

Well, without the plates in play one is left with the assumption that God chose to leave the repitition in. He didn't need to. He could have corrected it and thus removed one source of criticism.

The problem with this, Drifting, is that it makes assumptions about God. And what we end up with couldn't really be called a translation. At this point, the discussion would make such a left turn that we wouldn't be able to really make any progress. And your comments would be all about what you assume God would or wouldn't do as opposed to talking about the text and what the text might contribute to any discussion about translation.

So, given this, let me ask you five questions about your assumptions:

1: Is God more of an idea-for-idea kind of translator or a word-for-word kind of translator?
2: Assuming that God knows the thoughts of all mankind (past, present, and potentially future), does God translate to the intentions of the author, or would he translate what the author actually wrote? Or would God actually provide what God wanted independent of both the intentions of an author and what that author actually wrote?
3: What role, in a translation made by God, does the response of His audience play? That is, how does God choose the idealized audience that he is going to prepare the translation for?
4: There are often rhetorical figures used in texts. Some of them can affect translation. One of those is a Hebrew figure termed a Janus parallelism. The text uses an ambiguous word in between two statements such that it means one thing in the context of the statement made before the word, and another thing in the statement made after it. How does God translate this?
5: One of the rhetorical figures we find in texts is the literary allusion, where an author refers us to another text to add meaning and intention. We can speak of incompetent readers being readers who do not know the source that being alluded to, and so who cannot arrive at the meaning intended by an author. With the Book of Mormon, we potentially have many sources that get alluded to - which, because we do not have the source, we simply could never become competent readers. Howe would God translate such an allusion?

Ben M.

Ben, it may speed up your questioning process to understand that I do not believe God was involved in the production of the Book of Mormon.

If God was involved in the process, He chose to allow the most important scriptures that the world has ever received to be produced in such a condition that it would need significant, post production correction and mental gymnastics to make it fit with any kind of historical context. I don't have to answer for why He did that. That's your job.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Your explanation sounds reasonable, even probable.......until you add in the fact that no, I repeat NO, text has ever been found that is the original work of the said Marco Polo. In fact, careful analysis of the text shows that no single person exists as the narrator of the story. Note also that Marco Polo stories contain no mention of the Great Wall, tea or foot binding and according to Marco, the royal family kept dragons as pets. Marco Polo cannot be found and the stories attributed to him, hippopotamus or unicorn, simply are tales. If someone reads unicorn but sees a hippo instead, it is in the eye of the beholder alone. ("Did Marco Polo Go to China?" author Francis Wood, 1998).

First, you aren't telling us what Wood's book tells us (you have read the book right?):

Perhaps in the final analysis the text should be treated as two separate entities. The details of the Prologue, particularly those describing the first trip of Niccolo and Maffeo Polo, suggest a credible venture, whilst the rest of the text is a mixture of legend and geographical and historical description which hangs together in a quite different way

That is, that Marco Polo (and his family) existed seems credible. And a little later:

If he did not travel to China and India and the South East Asian archipelago, where did he get his information? Family stories and family familiarity with the Near East and beyond could have provided much material. His father and uncle's plausible excursion to Karakorum was a valuable starting point.

And then:

Whilst I incline to the view that Marco Polo himself probably never travelled much further than the family's trading posts on the Black Sea and in Constantinople, and was not responsible for Italian ice-cream or Chinese dumplings, this does not mean that the Description of the World does not
remain a valuable source of information on China and the Near East, in particular. His usefulness as a recorder of information otherwise lost is similar to the case of Herodotus (c. 484 BC to c. 425 BC), who did not travel to all the places he described and who mixed fact with fantastic tales, but whose work is nevertheless not to be discarded lightly.

When used in conjunction with Arabic, Persian and Chinese texts which bear out the spirit, if not always the detail, of its contents, the Description of the World remains a very rich source. The portrait of the chessboard city plan of Peking still stands, and remains, whatever its source, a credible
account of a city which no longer exists, but which has its place in the history of the settlements in the area. The contents of the Description of the World, used critically, remain important, and can be regarded as an example of the type of world geography which was beginning to become popular in the fourteenth century.

What this means is that your concerns don't seem to impact the issue here. We have a 14th century text. It describes the rhinoceros. It calls it a unicorn. It is identified as an example of semantic extension. What more do you want? It illustrates the problem of translation in which translators universally translate the text with the word unicorn and never with the word rhinoceros. Its still a very reasonable explanation. However, it isn't as good a case as the case with the unicorn/rhinoceros because of course while we can speculate over semantic extension on Nephi's part, its quite clear in the text attributed to Marco Polo that this is what is happening.

In the Book of Mormon I see more evidence via absence (which isn't very good evidence at all, as we all know).

Ben M.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Drifting writes:

Ben, it may speed up your questioning process to understand that I do not believe God was involved in the production of the Book of Mormon.

If God was involved in the process, He chose to allow the most important scriptures that the world has ever received to be produced in such a condition that it would need significant, post production correction and mental gymnastics to make it fit with any kind of historical context. I don't have to answer for why He did that. That's your job.

The problem is, Drifting, is that its still all about your assumption. If you were a Born Again Evangelical, you would run into the same problem with the Bible. That is, that God "chose to allow the most important scripture that the world has ever received to be produced in such a condition that it would need significant, post production correction and mental gymnastics to make it fit with any kind of historical context." From my perspective, the assumption is what is flawed. And its a deep theological debate (perhaps best epitomized in recent literature by VanHoozer's book Is There a Meaning in This Text).

From my perspective (and again, trying to keep this simple), texts are always flawed representations. They are flawed because of the limits of language. They are flawed because over time the distance between real readers and the idealized reader increases making people potentially more and more incompetent in their reading. And they are flawed because the text itself isn't capable of communicating. You can't ask it questions. It is merely an artifact. At some point, God isn't all that interested in giving us texts. God wants to communicate with us through the Holy Ghost. So, we get flawed texts in the hope that it points us to a more perfect communication - and that communication is personal, individual, and not as much an exercise in interpretation.

You understand what I mean though about the issue of assumptions right? You present something that you think ought to be obvious to everyone, in the terms you use, and yet, I don't think it very reasonable at all. This creates that funny moment in these discussions when you are the one attempting to use the supernatural to make your argument, while I am trying to minimize the role of the supernatural in mine. If we want to try and understand the process of the production of the Book of Mormon (either as a translation or entirely as a modern production), using the supernatural as a way of minimizing arguments won't be productive on either side.

Ben M.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Themis writes:

First it is unlikely that they would call a tapir a horse for various reason's , and even if they did, it would be more appropriate in this and other instances in the Book of Mormon to use the English equivalent of what they actually saw.

Perhaps you would explain why they wouldn't call a tapir a horse (to use this one potential semantic extension). And perhaps you would answer the 5 questions I asked of Drifting.

The one significant reason for loan shifting to occur is that the Old Testament (which they had in the brass plates) is very interested in classifying animals. It needs to indicate which are clean, and which are not. Finding new animals in the promised land, they would need to make this distinction rather quickly - and using the familiar labels from scripture would allow scripture to remain relevant without the need for an interpretive guide. One of those classifiers is the way an animals feet are made. Horses and Tapirs are among a very small group classified as odd-toed ungulates: the horses, the zebra, the tapir, and the rhinoceros. It all very speculative of course, its quite possibly unlikely. Its not unreasonable.

[_Themis]

Perhaps you would explain why they wouldn't call a tapir a horse (to use this one potential semantic extension).

I never said it was impossible, only unlikely. First we see no evidence, just an apologetic invention to get out of a sticky situation that horses did not exist in central America during Book of Mormon times. The tapir is not a good fit due to the differences that would be obvious from a group who is very likely to be familiar with old world horses. Loan shifting also usually does not call the animal exactly the same as another. Water horse, big dog are examples of this. So in the end it remains unlikely, but not impossible.

And perhaps you would answer the 5 questions I asked of Drifting.

1: Is God more of an idea-for-idea kind of translator or a word-for-word kind of translator?

Well if God is smarter then your average apologists then he wouldn't go for a translations process that would introduce a totally different and inaccurate story. The text itself does not support it, and why do this if God is capable of doing a more accurate method of word for word from a divine guy who would know best how to present it. Not to mention that this is what we see in those who describe the process as they understood it. Idea-for-idea is just an apologetic invention to get around very problematic areas because they will not look at it from the perspective that it may be made up. When you do, it really does fit so well. No more mental gymnastics.

2: Assuming that God knows the thoughts of all mankind (past, present, and potentially future), does God translate to the intentions of the author, or would he translate what the author actually wrote? Or would God actually provide what God wanted independent of both the intentions of an author and what that author actually wrote?

All are possibilities. We need to remember that supposedly God is the head author in the end, since he commanded it to be written, especially the Gold plates. This would mean that Mormon and Moroni would need some information from God as to what he wanted put down.

The one significant reason for loan shifting to occur is that the Old Testament (which they had in the brass plates) is very interested in classifying animals. It needs to indicate which are clean, and which are not. Finding new animals in the promised land, they would need to make this distinction rather quickly - and using the familiar labels from scripture would allow scripture to remain relevant without the need for an interpretive guide. One of those classifiers is the way an animals feet are made. Horses and Tapirs are among a very small group classified as odd-toed ungulates: the horses, the zebra, the tapir, and the rhinoceros. It all very speculative of course, its quite possibly unlikely. Its not unreasonable.

I did say it was unlikely, not impossible. Interesting using the Book of Mormon which has no real hints of them being Jewish/hebrew. You would think they were Christians from the 19th century. Also the brass plates? There really were no brass plates or gold plates for that matter. The brass plates were to be a lengthy record from written on brass. First that's a lot of brass, and we do not see any evidence anywhere that this is realistic. Second the gold plates should have a story over 1500 English pages. Again not realistic. If you look at it from the perspective that they may have made it up, it all fits together.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Themis writes:

First we see no evidence, just an apologetic invention to get out of a sticky situation that horses did not exist in central America during Book of Mormon times.

We are probably going to disagree on this point. The animals we do see mentioned - apart from the problematic account in Ether - come in contexts that remind us of the Old Testament. The example I made (elsewhere?) was the issue of the goat and the wild goat - which is how the KJV references two animals from the Old Testament. Outside of such a context, the way it appears in the Book of Mormon makes very little sense. So, the evidence is driven by the text. And I wouldn't say that it is purely an apologetic invention (although often criticism points out difficulties in the text for us to see). For all intents and purposes, the idea that there were horses after seems to be a rather popular apologetic for the issue. So ... its development isn't entirely based in an apology.

The tapir is not a good fit due to the differences that would be obvious from a group who is very likely to be familiar with old world horses.

This argument simply doesn't work. The assumptions that its based on are discussed in a very detailed way in the Umberto Eco book I mentioned elsewhere (Kant and the Platypus). So, I won't accept this as a reasonable response.

Loan shifting also usually does not call the animal exactly the same as another. Water horse, big dog are examples of this.

This isn't exactly true, and its not (at least in the way you use it) all that similar to the issue here. This is why I try to be more precise in my descriptions, and to provide historical examples of the same thing I am suggesting - so that is possible to see in action elsewhere what I suggest was going on here.

Well if God is smarter then your average apologists then he wouldn't go for a translations process that would introduce a totally different and inaccurate story. The text itself does not support it, and why do this if God is capable of doing a more accurate method of word for word from a divine guy who would know best how to present it. Not to mention that this is what we see in those who describe the process as they understood it. Idea-for-idea is just an apologetic invention to get around very problematic areas because they will not look at it from the perspective that it may be made up. When you do, it really does fit so well. No more mental gymnastics.

So what you are saying, is that God doesn't translate. he just provides something new that doesn't have to be related at all to whatever it was that was there. Gotcha. I don't agree with anything you wrote, but that's a different issue.

All are possibilities. We need to remember that supposedly God is the head author in the end, since he commanded it to be written, especially the Gold plates. This would mean that Mormon and Moroni would need some information from God as to what he wanted put down.

The problem, of course, is that the Book of Mormon itself (which discusses this issue quite a bit in 1 and 2 Nephi) disagrees with you. Further, Mormon and Moroni tend to disagree with you when they describe what they are doing. So, we have this absolutely profound difference between us here.

I did say it was unlikely, not impossible. Interesting using the Book of Mormon which has no real hints of them being Jewish/hebrew. You would think they were Christians from the 19th century. Also the brass plates? There really were no brass plates or gold plates for that matter. The brass plates were to be a lengthy record from written on brass. First that's a lot of brass, and we do not see any evidence anywhere that this is realistic. Second the gold plates should have a story over 1500 English pages. Again not realistic. If you look at it from the perspective that they may have made it up, it all fits together.

And all of this points to the fact that we aren't going to have any reasonable discussion between us. I certainly don't accept your assumptions - and given that those assumptions are usual central to your arguments, I pretty much know that I won't accept your arguments either.

Ben M.

[_Themis]

We are probably going to disagree on this point. The animals we do see mentioned - apart from the problematic account in Ether - come in contexts that remind us of the Old Testament.

And Joseph's Smith's day. I am not the one who needs to invent this stuff to try and make it work. Again I did not say impossible, only unlikely.

The example I made (elsewhere?) was the issue of the goat and the wild goat - which is how the KJV references two animals from the Old Testament. Outside of such a context, the way it appears in the Book of Mormon makes very little sense. So, the evidence is driven by the text.

Which fits what Joseph could have known or thought.

This argument simply doesn't work. The assumptions that its based on are discussed in a very detailed way in the Umberto Eco book I mentioned elsewhere (Kant and the Platypus). So, I won't accept this as a reasonable response.

Of course you don't. Again it's an apologetic invention. It's not found in the text, so it really is unlikely.

This isn't exactly true, and its not (at least in the way you use it) all that similar to the issue here. This is why I try to be more precise in my descriptions, and to provide historical examples of the same thing I am suggesting - so that is possible to see in action elsewhere what I suggest was going on here.

I never said that was how it's done all the time.

So what you are saying, is that God doesn't translate. he just provides something new that doesn't have to be related at all to whatever it was that was there. Gotcha.

Please don't misrepresent what I said. The idea of ideas being given to Joseph is the loose translation idea, but one in which you would not get an accurate translation of what is supposed to be written on the plates, since it will have to be filtered through Joseph and all of his cultural bias, etc. It also does not fit the text or what eye witnesses describe. It is an apologetic to try and get around the obvious problems, and it makes little sense for God to do it this way.

I don't agree with anything you wrote, but that's a different issue.

Not surprising, but I still like and respect you.

The problem, of course, is that the Book of Mormon itself (which discusses this issue quite a bit in 1 and 2 Nephi) disagrees with you. Further, Mormon and Moroni tend to disagree with you when they describe what they are doing. So, we have this absolutely profound difference between us here.

CFR

And all of this points to the fact that we aren't going to have any reasonable discussion between us.

I have been more then reasonable, but I cannot accept some of the poor apologia on some of this stuff.

I certainly don't accept your assumptions - and given that those assumptions are usual central to your arguments, I pretty much know that I won't accept your arguments either.

And what assumptions would those be. That metal plates have not been used for keeping lengthy records. That is not an assumption.

[_Benjamin McGuire]

Themis, I seem to have misread some of your earlier comments.

On the issue of translation, word-for-word or idea-for-idea, those notions are simply an easy to understand way of saying "Formal Equivalence" and "Dynamic Equivalence" in translation. You can read a bit about it here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_an ... quivalence

My question on this point has nothing to do with an apologetic argument (as you seem to suggest). This is not about the apologetics, its about assumptions on how God would translate - an issue that you seem to have completely avoided by attacking (again) the notion of apologetics.

So perhaps you could answer the question - does God translate more with a formal equivalence or more with a dynamic equivalence.

I never said that was how it's done all the time.

I am not sure you even understand the process. I prefer semantic extension or semantic expansion to the term loan shifting. A useful definition reads: "Loan shifting describes the process through which a word undergoes semantic extension on the model of a foreign counterpart." The problem is, there is no foreign language here. There is only semantic extension. So to call it loan shifting creates something of a misnomer of what is happening. So while you talk about the "river horse" - where we see lexical shifts based on a foreign language, this isn't what is being discussed for the Book of Mormon.

CFR

Sure. Let's start with Nephi.

1 Nephi 6:4 "For the fulness of mine intent is that I may persuade men to come unto the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, and be saved."
1 Nephi 9:5 "Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me to make these plates for a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not."

That seems pretty clear doesn't it? I could produce other references that lead to the same separation. Now from Mormon -

Words of Mormon 3-5 "... after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake, I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates, which contained this small account of the prophets, from Jacob down to the reign of this king Benjamin, and also many of the words of Nephi. And the things which are upon these plates pleasing me, ... Wherefore, I chose these things, to finish my record upon them, which remainder of my record I shall take from the plates of Nephi; and I cannot write the hundredth part of the things of my people."

3 Nephi 5:16 "Therefore I do make my record from the accounts which have been given by those who were before me, until the commencement of my day;"

Moroni 1:1,4 "Now I, Moroni, after having made an end of abridging the account of the people of Jared, I had supposed not to have written more, but I have not as yet perished ... Wherefore, I write a few more things, contrary to that which I had supposed; for I had supposed not to have written any more; but I write a few more things, that perhaps they may be of worth unto my brethren, the Lamanites, in some future day, according to the will of the Lord."

Enough?

Ben M.