Interpreting Interpreter: Examining Transliterations

This post is a summary of the article “A Closer Look at Transliterations in Divine Translations” by Spencer Kraus in Volume 63 of Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. All of the Interpreting Interpreter articles may be seen at https://interpreterfoundation.org/category/summaries/. An introduction to the Interpreting Interpreter series is available at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreting-interpreter-on-abstracting-thought/.

A video introduction to this Interpreter article is now available on all of our social media channels, including on YouTube at https://youtube.com/shorts/5kqmIQHJCZ0.

The Takeaway

Kraus argues that the transliterated words of the Book of Mormon are the same types of words that translators often leave untranslated in other texts, suggesting that it really is a translation rather than a work of fiction.

The Summary

In this article, Spencer Kraus examines the transliterated words of the Book of Mormon—i.e., those not translated into English, such as

cureloms, cumoms, and ziff—and compares them with the kinds of words that translators tend to transliterate in other texts. The types of words include:

- Words that appear infrequently. Translators may decline to translate words that appear very infrequently in a text, as it can be difficult to understand their intended meaning. This applies to a variety of rare or potentially unfamiliar terms in the Septuagint, and may apply to words like sheum, neas, ziff, cureloms and cumoms in the Book of Mormon.

- Technical terms. The Septuagint translators often transliterated technical terms, including the names for weights and measures (e.g., ēpāh, hin, ḥōmer, kōr, and ōmer), similar to the transliterated system of measures found in Alma 11:3-19. Yet others transliterate words with complex meanings that have no clear equivalent in English, such as logos or kosmos in the New Testament, or dharma in the Lotus Sutra. Kraus pays particular attention to the terms Rameumptom, Liahona, and Gazelem, as technical common nouns that may have been mistaken for proper nouns or vis versa.

- Rare animals and plants. Scholars note the general difficulty with identifying the nomenclature of fauna and flora, and some avoid translating the terms to avoid ambiguity and misidentifications, such as with the term koy in the Mishnah Bikkurim (with debate as to whether it represents a deer, a goat, or some type of hybrid), or the mythological asura in the Lotus Sutra. The Book of Mormon plants sheum and neas, the word deseret, and the animal terms curelom and cumom fall in this category. Joseph Smith would himself transliterate the word “unicorn” in Isaiah 34:7 to re-em in the JST, reflecting the underlying Hebrew.

It’s notable that the Book of Mormon leaves similar kinds of words untranslated, as are the promising etymologies for many of these words in relevant Old World languages. Though some readers assume that an inspired translation process should not have such instances of transliteration, Kraus instead concludes:

“The Book of Mormon reflects details typical of a translated text in which the translator did his best to share the original intent of the text in his native language but was left with some words that of necessity could not be translated into English. This is especially clear when the former cases are studied in their context… If Joseph Smith had left these untranslated words in as a red herring to make his claims to have translated an ancient record more believable, it would be inconceivable to get so many details consistently right.”

The Reflection

I find these kinds of minor textual details fascinating, particularly when it comes to the meanings and glosses of these unfamiliar words. I like the tack that Kraus is taking here, in terms of thinking about what the translation process of the Book of Mormon should’ve and would’ve looked like if it was authentic. An interesting next step, for me, would be to more rigorously compare it to the alternative hypothesis. When it comes to cureloms and cumoms, most critics would assume that they’re pseudo-biblical terms in the same vein as tribbles or a smeerps—fictional words for fictional objects meant to communicate the strangeness of a given culture. But do the Book of Mormon’s transliterated words actually behave like fictional terms? Answering that question would give us the second half of Kraus’s analytic coin, and my guess is we’d see some important contrasts.

For instance, I suspect that when fictional terms are introduced, it would be rare that they’d just be used once or twice. Take, for example, Brandon Sanderson’s chulls, the crab-like cattle of the Cosmere. It’s a strange term for a strange animal, but he doesn’t introduce it as a one-off. He uses it hundreds if not thousands of times throughout the course of his books, in part to build a consistently alien (and yet familiar, given the chulls’ function as livestock) world. We wouldn’t necessarily expect a fraudulent Book of Mormon to use these terms with the same consistency or skill as with Sanderson, but we probably wouldn’t expect Joseph to toss out a word like curelom and then immediately throw it away. A thorough analysis of transliterated terms in modern sci-fi and fantasy would add an interesting exclamation point to Kraus’ broader argument, perhaps providing yet another demonstration of how the Book of Mormon is a truly unexpected text.

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