Apologists and some others try explaining away the unexplainable by talking about Joseph Smith making a "tight or loose" translation of the Gold Plates.

The idea of a magic peepstone & a hat throws that one in the manure pile completely.

The story is the words would appear on the stone - read to the scribe & repeated. If not correct he would change the writing to be correct. ONLY then did the next words appear.\

No chance all for any kind of interpretation or wiggle room.

Mormon experts done in by their own records..., imagine that?

That sounds like more of the "permanent" and "temporary" commandment type of excuse tactics.

It's so obvious that most apologists have little or no experience in translating languages.

First, in my experience, you cannot translate word by word.

Sentence structure various by language.

Simple example, "a casa branca" in Portuguese would translate word for word to "the house white".

On must transliterate, take whole meaning of a sentence and put it into the same meaning of a sentence in the new language.

If I translate a word like "swine" from one language, I can still be specific and say Boar in english if in the context of the sentence they're referring to a wild boar.

It is ludicrous to say the word in hebrew means horse, so we wrote horse but they were referring to tapir.

In translating, the translator could have simply written tapir.

The fact that mormon God can't say exactly what he means, proves he can never mean exactly that he says.

A few comments on translation, which is a fascinating topic.

First, with related pairs of languages it is sometimes possible to achieve a word-for-word translation: Danish and Swedish, for example, or Dutch and German. Some of the Romance languages are also close enough to permit something approaching word-for-word fidelity.

Second, there are fields--science, technology, law--in which there is a strong preference for word-for-word translations even if at the expense of fluidity or even accuracy. If terms are significantly different in the two (or more) versions, they are glossed in footnotes or endnotes. That approach facilitates discussion of individual words rather than phrases, which is easier for patents, courts, and diplomats.

Third, "transliteration" does not mean a sentence-by-sentence approach but rather the representation of names and other words in a new alphabet or set of symbols. Thus "Trump" is transliterated into Chinese as 川普 and "America" becomes 美利坚. Likewise, the Arabic name محم is transliterated into English as "Mohammed."

When "alphabets" do not match exactly, transliteration depends on arbitrary conventions over which experts sometimes disagree. For example, the name of the author of Crime and Punishment is Достоевский, which is transliterated into English as "Dostoevsky," "Dostoyevsky" or even "Dostoevski."

Depending on one's personality, translation is either fascinating or infuriating.

Or both.

So.....can Hebrew be translated word for word into English as Joseph claims?

I dunno. Are English and Hebrew more closely related than Portuguese and Spanish?

Which is tight and which is loose?

"White and Delightsome" or "Pure and Delightsome"

"Cursed with a skin of blackness" or "Cursed to wear dark animal skins"

"A land preserved for his posterity" or "Among the ancestors"

The most correct book ever written needed over 3000 corrections.

I've heard claims that it was "transliterated".

"My client only stole that car "loosely" your honor."

"Well. That puts things in a whole new light,Counselor. Case dismissed!?"

New translations continue to appear as do the transliterations, but both are surpassed by the Continuing Explanations...



just sayin'



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 12/31/2024 12:02PM by GNPE.

Transplanations? Does have a Mormon ring to it.