A key moment in the Church’s establishment in different locations and cultures—including among countries like Brazil, where the Church officially has over one million members—is the translation of the Book of Mormon. Especially in earlier years, the effort was performed by missionaries with rudimentary knowledge of the language working with locals to create the translation, which meant that revisions and retranslations would later be necessary, once the Church had access to a higher level of expertise in translation. The story of the translation and retranslations of the Book of Mormon in Portuguese to aid missionary efforts in Brazil and how that helped to launch a professionalization of the process in the Church was the subject of a recent interview with Jeremy Talmage at the Latter-day Saint history blog From the Desk. 

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How Was the Book of Mormon Translated Into Portuguese?

During the twentieth century, a theme of the spread of Christian denominations is specific religions being carried with people to new countries as they migrated to new locations. This applies to the Church as well, which explains why the South American missions in Argentina and Brazil were initially German-speaking rather than Spanish or Portuguese:

The South American Mission started in Argentina after a handful of German immigrants petitioned for missionaries to be sent to teach their friends. Looking for other lost members and new areas to expand the mission, German-speaking missionaries crossed the border into Brazil in 1928.

At the time, nearly two hundred and fifty thousand Germans called Brazil home, most having moved there due to the intense economic inflation that followed the First World War. Clustered in tight-knit communities, Germans were able to preserve their language and culture.

With very few members or missionaries who spoke Portuguese, the Church struggled to expand. For over a decade, German remained the official mission language.

Thus, at the dawn of WWII, the mission president in Brazil had a background with Germany more than with Latin America:

William West Seegmiller was the president of the Brazilian Mission from 1942 to 1945. As a young man, he served in the German Mission and later as the president of the Western States Mission. He was a trusted ecclesiastical leader sent to Brazil to see the Church through the Second World War.

Seegmiller and many of the missionaries were not as familiar with the Portuguese translation of the Book of Mormon as a result.

The Portuguese translation had been created in the late 1930s, but didn’t have a wide distribution:

The translation of the Book of Mormon into Portuguese started in the fall of 1937 and was completed in December 1939. Due to a paper shortage created by the war, the first copies were not available until March 1940. Even after publication, the translation was not widely used until after the Church ceased missionary work in German. …

The Portuguese translation of the Book of Mormon was a combination of two independent translations. The first was led by Daniel Shupe, a member of the Church who had moved to Rio de Janeiro to work for the U.S. State Department. He was assisted by his wife “Guida” Agda Viera Shupe and her mother, Maria Viera, both elementary school teachers. Shupe did the bulk of translating with his wife and mother-in-law assisting with Portuguese grammar. …

A second independent translation was completed by Williams Lane, a contracted professional translator affiliated with Mackenzie College in São Paulo, a Presbyterian school founded by Lane’s grandfather. Mário Pedroso, a student of Lane’s, served as the editor charged with combining the two translations.

Political events, however, led to a greater emphasis on Portuguese, as the Brazilian government put in place prohibitions against teaching or publishing in any language other than Portuguese as part of a larger effort to force Germans to assimilate into national culture.

By 1943, Seegmiller was working to respond to the war, but was alarmed by reports of concerns about the Book of Mormon translation:

Seegmiller’s instructions were to safely evacuate the remaining North American missionaries from Brazil when their service ended and close the mission down. Shortly before the last missionaries departed, they reported discovering “a great many very flagrant errors in doctrine” in the Portuguese Book of Mormon.

Seegmiller also heard rumors that the translation was done by a female Catholic scholar and an apostate who intentionally “injected some Catholic doctrine” into the Book of Mormon.

Specifically, 

Seegmiller suspected that “Catholic doctrine” had found a way into the Portuguese Book of Mormon text and that the book taught “the wrong conception of Deity and the Godhead.”

He identified four specific examples and predicted that “a great many more mistakes” would be discovered.

In reality, the errors were magnified far beyond the reality of the situation:

Most of the errors were simple translation mistakes that had only a minor impact on the interpretation of the Portuguese Book of Mormon text. For example:

• The missing verse was an unintentional typesetting error.
• The supposed Catholic expression had been imagined.
• The denial of the doctrine of baptism by immersion was overstated.

However, the Portuguese translation did add the word “being” to some verses about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost being “one,” though it did not do so consistently. 

Still, the reports sparked a strong reaction:

Church officials were greatly alarmed and deemed it “unwise to distribute books containing such flagrant errors,” given “the translation regarding the Godhead and the ordinance of baptism.” Seegmiller suggested destroying every available copy of the Book of Mormon in Portuguese, but the First Presidency urged caution and instead suggested including notes in the margins to clarify mistranslations.

In their reply, they promised to take steps to retranslate the book. …

Despite the desire to have the retranslation done by a committee in Salt Lake, the lack of capable bilingual speakers eventually necessitated moving the effort back to Brazil.

The responsibility fell to two American missionaries, brothers Harry and Raymond Maxwell. They found the task more difficult than they imagined and struggled to teach correct Latter-day Saint doctrine without altering the text.

Translators now receive specific instructions on how to “preserve the doctrine” of the English text.

Ultimately, they concluded the problem was not the translation but the theological simplicity of the Book of Mormon itself. A revised edition appeared seven years after their translation, only to be replaced five years after that with another completely new Portuguese translation.

More broadly, the incident raised concerns about the nature of existing translations of the Book of Mormon: 

Up until this time, Church leadership had only been minimally involved in the translation of the Book of Mormon. Seegmiller’s letter raised the real possibility that doctrinal errors might exist in other translations as well.

Almost immediately, apostolic advisers were assigned to translations then in progress, and shortly thereafter, new retranslations were started in German, Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, and French. The translators hired at this time would later become the Church’s Translation Department.

This Translation Department has standardized the process, greatly improving speed and accuracy while giving guidance on how to “preserve the doctrine” of the English text. An example I came across in a different source discussed, for example, the translation of the Book of Mormon into Mongolian in the late 1990s:

[I] was only allowed to use the English Book of Mormon to do the translation. We don’t use the Russian or other languages to translate from. I also had a dictionary and a three-volume lexicon. … Every word from the Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, and Pearl of Great Price were in this three-volume lexicon. For example, the word “child” and the number of times it came up, the meaning, etc. … I had to maintain consistency. So if the word “minister” had three different meanings, I had to find a word in Mongolian to match all three meanings. (Munkhtsetseg Dugarsuren, cited in Po Nien (Felipe) Chou and Petra Chou, Voice of the Saints in Mongolia (Provo, Utah: BYU RSC, 2022), 159.)

This highlights how far the process of oversight for translation had come since the 1940s.

For more on the translation of the Book of Mormon into Portuguese, head on over to From the Desk to read the full interview with Jeremy Talmage.