CaliforniaKid wrote:See
this page on beastie's wonderful website. At the last Sunstone, Don Bradley presented on this subject and argued that pretty much all of the evidence points to a visual method of translation. I.e., Joseph Smith looked at the seer stone and literally saw English words appear on its surface. Don pointed out that the one prooftext for loose translation-- "work it out in your mind"-- is directed to Oliver, who had the "gift of the rod". Divination with a rod, unlike a seer stone, is a strictly binary process. Like a magic 8-ball, it can only give
yes or
no answers.
From beastie's site:
Certainly some of these citations are less reliable than others, whether due to a later date or bias of some sort. In addition, some of the statements are ambiguous as far as what, exactly, Joseph “saw” in the stone or spectacles. Even so, enough reliable sources are given with enough detail that I think “Joseph as reader”, or the tight translation theory, is more consistent with contemporary statements. The tight translation theory tends to be preferred by those who specialize in the Hebraic connections in the Book of Mormon. Their evidences would lose force were they to abdicate the tight control of the text, since it is in linguistic structure that they find their hope.
However, as I stated earlier, the Hebraic side of the equation does not interest me. In my experience, most Book of Mormon scholars who specialize in the Mesoamerican side of the equation prefer the “loose translation” theory. Although the process remains ambiguous in their descriptions, apparently some sort of gestalt is conveyed spiritually to Joseph Smith rather than specific words, and Joseph Smith then proceeded to put that gestalt into his own language. This allows translation errors that impact the text’s meaning to be included, in their opinion. The existence of translation errors is imperative for these scholars, due to the numerous anachronisms contained in the text. Although it is necessary to read specific arguments to get the full thrust of this theory, Brant Gardner does address it on his website devoted to the Book of Mormon, in his essay called “Translated Correctly, Assessing the Evidence for the Translation Method”.
I encourage readers to tackle the essay for themselves. My understanding of his main divergence from Skousen is that Gardner believes Joseph Smith put his own understanding of the text into his own words, which allows for significant translation errors to enter the text. It is not clear in what form Joseph Smith’s understanding of the text took place, so I simply refer to it as some sort of gestalt.
Due to the fact that my main interest lies in the Mesoamerican side of the equation, I will frame my responses within the “loose translation” theory, although my opinion is that Skousen’s interpretation of the witness statements is stronger. So while I accept that translation errors may have resulted in Joseph choosing a known word to describe something unknown to him, hence resulting in a naming error, the context of the statements containing the translation error should still make sense within the context of ancient Mesoamerica.
From
Skousen (Evidence for tight control):
The idea of a revealed text raises an important question: To what degree did the Lord control the dictation of the Book of Mormon? There appear to be three possible kinds of control over the dictation of the text:
1. Loose control: Ideas were revealed to Joseph Smith, and he put those ideas into his own language (a theory advocated by many Book of Mormon scholars over the years);
2. Tight control: Joseph saw specific words written out in English and read them off to the scribe—the accuracy of the resulting text depending on the carefulness of Joseph and his scribe;
3. Iron-clad control: Joseph (or the interpreters themselves) would not allow any scribal error to remain (including the spelling of common words).
One can also conceive of mixtures of these different kinds of control. For instance, one might argue for tight control over the spelling of specific names, but loose control over the English phraseology itself.......In contrast to this error from the original manuscript, the errors that are found in the printer's manuscript show that this second manuscript was visually copied. As Oliver Cowdery was copying from the original manuscript into the printer's manuscript, he sometimes incorrectly read the original manuscript. In many cases, the error leads to a more difficult reading, as in the following example:
•Alma 30:52
original manuscript:
yea & I always knew that there was a God
printer's manuscript:
yea & I also knew that there was a God
This error was due to visual similarity between the words always and also. This kind of error does not appear in the original manuscript, because the scribes were not copying from another written source but were hearing the words dictated by Joseph Smith. For example, in Alma 33:15 the text of the original manuscript reads as follows:
for it is not written that Zenos alone spake of these things but Zenoch also spake of these things
Oliver Cowdery first wrote Zenock using the expected ck English spelling for the k sound when preceded by a short vowel. But then Oliver crossed out the whole word and immediately afterwards, on the same line, wrote Zenoch, thus indicating that the spelling agrees with the biblical name Enoch. This example also suggests that Joseph Smith spelled out the ch sequence for Oliver, although it is possible that Joseph could have repronounced the ch sequence with the incorrect ch sound rather than with the correct k sound in order to help Oliver get it down right.
But there are also examples for which it is impossible to find a repronunciation that will guarantee the correct spelling. For instance, in Helaman 1:15 Oliver Cowdery first wrote the name Coriantumr phonetically, as Coriantummer, then he crossed it all out and wrote out the correct spelling, Coriantumr:
& they were lead by a man whose name was Coriantumr
In this case, no matter how slowly or carefully Joseph Smith might have repronounced Coriantumr, it would have been impossible for him to have indicated that there was no vowel between the m and r at the end of the name except by actually spelling out the separate letters m and r. Nor could Oliver have guessed this spelling since no word (or name) in English ends in mr. In fact, Oliver ends the correct spelling Coriantumr with a large flourish on the final r, which Oliver produces nowhere else in either the original or the printer's manuscript. This addition may reveal Oliver's frustration at having to guess at such a weird spelling.....The specific evidence from the original manuscript is consistent with the claim that the scribe read back what had been written. In such a process, Joseph Smith would be checking what he was hearing from the scribe against what he was viewing in the interpreters. But such agreement would not guarantee the accuracy of the manuscript. For instance, the name Amalickiah was frequently spelled as Ameleckiah in the original manuscript. This misspelling shows that Joseph placed the stress on the first syllable, not the second. If the stress had been on the second syllable, the scribe would have consistently spelled the second vowel with the letter a. Therefore, given Joseph's pronunciation of Amalickiah with stress on the first syllable, there would be no way for him to detect the incorrect spelling Ameleckiah when the scribe, in reading back the text, pronounced the name as Joseph did (with stress on the first syllable). This same difficulty in hearing word differences applies to phonetically similar words (such as and versus an). Many of the undetected errors that remain in the original manuscript could not have been caught when read back because there was little if any difference in pronunciation......The evidence for loose control seems to rely heavily upon the notion that the nonstandard use of English in the original text could not have come from the Lord (since some suppose he only speaks "correct" English). The use of dialectal English, in this view, is said to be Joseph Smith's contribution, thus by inference the Lord only gave Joseph Smith ideas, not specific words. However, Joseph's practice of spelling out names definitely suggests that a theory of loose control must be revised in some way: Joseph had some view of the specific spelling for names, in particular, names with impossible spellings for English literates....Evidence from the original manuscript supports the traditional belief that Joseph Smith received a revealed text by means of the interpreters. This idea of a controlled text originates with statements made by witnesses of the translation. The evidence from the original manuscript, when joined with internal evidence from the text itself, suggests that this control was tight, but not iron-clad. The text could be "ungrammatical" from a prescriptive point of view, but the use of nonstandard English is not evidence that the text was not being tightly controlled, or that it did not come from the Lord, who apparently does not share our insistence on "proper English" (see D&C 1:24). In fact, the occurrence of non-English Hebraisms such as the if-and construction strongly suggests that the text was tightly controlled down to the level of the word at least. This tight control is also supported by the consistent phraseology in the original text. And the spelling of names such as Coriantumr suggests that control could be imposed down to the very letter.
Is Don's presentation available yet?