The “mentalese” translation theory
Posted: Sat Jul 19, 2025 12:52 am
https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... f-gardner/
Mentalese should be taken in moderate doses, as overindulging can lead to unintended leakage and release. Do not combine with the sister product, “Colon Blow,” or severe dehydration can occur.“The rag known as Interpreter” wrote: Clearly, then, Joseph did not translate the plates in the way that intermediate students of Hebrew or Greek labor to translate a short homework passage into their native languages. His translation was initiated by divine transmission of the meaning assigned to the characters on the plates by their original writers. At first, Joseph found it easiest to receive this transmission by means of the interpreters, a large spectacle-like device that was buried with the plates, or with one of the two seer stones that he had found and used during his adolescence, as many in his neighborhood did.
(Parenthetically, “dowsers” and other adepts were—and probably still are—routinely consulted in the northern Vermont farming community where I spent my summers as a girl. As a constant witness of the cruel unpredictability of our neighbors’ harvests, I could easily understand the comfort that extra-rational talismans and beliefs offered.)
Joseph placed the seer stone in a hat to block out the light and used it to focus on the interpretation he was receiving, though by the time Joseph moved on to later translation projects he had no need of those physical aids.
Some interested parties have argued that these aids provided a text that Joseph merely needed to read aloud. This is bolstered by several first-person narratives recalling Joseph’s careful and specific spelling of unfamiliar names, which were apparently given to him letter-by-letter. However, Gardner’s analysis of such recollections establishes that such care was only taken the first time an unfamiliar name appeared.
Instead, Gardner is among a growing number of Book of Mormon scholars who argue that Joseph’s mind received revelation as blocks of pre-verbal knowledge—what Gardner refers to as “mentalese.” Joseph then projected or imagined these impressions into being in the form of visions, which he then attempted to describe verbally. Gardner quotes Kathleen Flake’s study of the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible:
Translating for Early American ReadersIt appears that when he read he saw events, not words. What he saw, he verbalized to a scribe. . . . Arguably, then, ‘translate’ expressed Smith’s experience of ‘study[ing] it out in [his mind’ or his sense of agency in front of the text. Smith did not think of himself as God’s stenographer. Rather, he was an interpreting reader, and God the confirming authority.
The Lord began the translation process by transmitting a correct interpretation of the text composed by the original authors to Joseph through revelation. But more work had to be done before the interpretation could become a translation fully comprehensible to its target readers. As Gardner explains,
Joseph’s part in the project of translation was to act as an “inter-cultural mediator,” framing the divine interpretation of the plates with forms that would signal that the Book of Mormon was indeed a second witness of God to the people of his time and place. To do so, Joseph used the pseudo-biblical language conditioned by the King James version of the Bible that signaled authoritative public discourse in both religious and secular contexts to early nineteenth-century Americans. He also took care to publish the Book of Mormon in volumes that were the same size and binding of the most commonly used Bibles in America and Britain.because the translation’s original 1830 audience had virtually nothing in common with the purported original language and culture recorded on the golden plates, what might have been effective communication when the Nephite text was finalized around AD 400 would be less effective with its primary audience fourteen centuries later. . . . [It] required modifications of some sort for the translation to be comprehensible to its first readers.
An effective translation can’t help but generate its own artifacts, which is to say expressions or images meaningful to the target audience that are not part of the original text. Examples of such artifacts are easily found in the King James translation of the Bible. Neither St. Matthew nor his audience knew of candles or candlesticks, yet we accept the translation “Neither do men light a candle, and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick” (Matthew 5:15) without quibbling about small oil lamps. So, when Joseph, who presumably knew nothing about the animals of pre-conquest Mesoamerica, writes about “flocks” and “other sheep,” those who are more knowledgeable can recognize the misattributions as artifacts produced by a translator describing unfamiliar realities to the nineteenth-century farmers that made up his audience.
Gardner argues that Joseph’s dictation of his translation to a scribe leaves its own trail of artifacts. One of his examples points to the incomplete and run-on sentences in the Book of Mormon. Across cultures, the mind can hold on to about thirty seconds of speech before needing to be refreshed. Gardner found that:
You will have to read the book to discover Gardner’s other, equally fascinating, insights into the evidence that Joseph’s translation left of itself.The difference between the typical completed sentences and the various examples of incomplete sentences lies in the combination of a dangling verb and a quantity of intervening clauses. When at least three clauses followed the initial hanging verb, Joseph typically lost track of the hanging verbal clause and did not resolve it. That is consistent with the capacity of short-term memory list items. The interrupted nature of the translation added time to the dictation and thus increased the memory load. In these cases, the memory tax was so high that the sentences were left without resolution.
