When are We “Done” with Book of Mormon Translations?

Stephen C

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Book of Mormon in Elvish per Scripture Central

In terms of translating sacred scripture, we have nothing on the Protestants. One of the go-to sources for describing and cataloging languages, the publication Ethnologue, was originally started (and is still used, I believe) as a tool to help Evangelical Christians record which languages still needed Bible translations. 

A question I’ve had in the back in my mind for a while is if we’ll ever get to a point of saturation with scriptural translations, where we’ll basically have translations for all major languages outside of some uncontacted Papua New Guinean tribe and everything becomes about maintenance. However, when you juxtapose the number of BoM translations (115, according to the latest on Wikipedia) with the thousands of thousands of languages it’s clear there is a lot more work to do.

However, languages follow a sort of power distribution where a small number of languages are responsible for a lot of speakers, and there is an argument made that there are significant diminishing marginal returns once you get past a certain number of languages. Furthermore, the number of languages used will decrease sharply over the next century as globalization incentivizes people to switch over to lingua francas and predominant national and international languages over their local patois. So on one hand we have a professional translation department working on very out-of-the-way languages, and on the other side of the equation we have a significant decline in said languages. I was curious about the actual numbers involved so I decided to run my own on a variety of different questions. 

For my source of data I’m using a fascinating Nature article that uses variables like road density to project the future of language diversity worldwide (specifically the supplementary material). Here I’m using “L1” speakers, or the number of mother tongue speakers. For BoM translation purposes, while a lot of people speak lingua francas and could read Church materials in the languages of the colonisers or what have you, I assume that to really get it in their own language they would need to have an L1 translation. For Book of Mormon translations I’m using the Wikipedia article on it, which is probably a year or two out of date. 

First: What is the Distribution of L1 Languages Worldwide?

I calculated the quintiles for number of languages by number of speakers. As you can see, the vast majority of languages have less than 100,000 speakers (the median language has 6,000). So there is definitely a power distribution here, where a small number of languages are responsible for a large number of speakers. For translation purposes this means there is obvious low-hanging fruit, but after those are picked the effort per person starts to skyrocket.

0%: 0

20%: 400

40%: 2840

60%: 12,400

80%: 76,000

100%: 921,000,000

Second: What are the most spoken mother-tongue languages that do not have a Book of Mormon translation? 

By far the top position is Bengali with around ¼ billion L1 speakers and no complete Book of Mormon translation. However, it is currently in the process of being translated. After Bengali it drops off significantly with #2 being Javanese at about 84 million. After Javanese the next 11 with one exception (Sundanese) are Indian languages. This kind of surprises me. I thought there’d be more languages from the Muslim world in the top spots, but evidently not. There is, of course, a long history of India not being a particularly fruitful missionary field, and I wonder how much bilingualism influences the decisions about which translations would be more impactful. For example, there is a Book of Mormon translation in Catalan, the local dialect of my mission in Eastern Spain, but virtually everybody who speaks fluent Catalan speaks fluent Spanish, so while the Book of Mormon in Catalan is kind of a nice overture to Catalan nationalists, I’m not sure it actually influenced comprehensibility that much. 

Third: Are there any untranslated European languages with significant speakership? 

Yes. Bavarian is listed as its own language in the Nature article, and there are no complete translations of the Book of Mormon into Bavarian (paging Jonathan Green).

Fourth: What % of L1 speakers are covered by current BoM translations worldwide?

67%, not as much as I thought, but again these are L1 speakers, so it presumably doesn’t cover, for example, a big chunk of Africa where they are fluent in one of the lingua francas (e.g. Swahili, Arabic, English, French), but their L1 mother tongue is technically their local language, so this number should not be interpreted as how many people can fluently read the Book of Mormon.

Fifth: Which Book of Mormon translation is most “niche,” with the fewest number of speakers? 

The Yapese language, spoken on the Pacific island of Yap, has 5,000 speakers. Matter of fact, Yapese’s Wikipedia article has a picture of the Book of Mormon. 

Sixth: Are there any endangered languages with Book of Mormon translations?

According to the Nature article, Maori scores a 6b on the EGIDS endangerment scale, which makes it “threatened: The language is used for face-to-face communication within all generations, but it is losing users.”

Navajo is currently under translation, but also scores an 6b. A study I did while at the Census Bureau that projected the native Navajo-speaking population showed that their future is not promising.  

Seventh: Are there any unofficial translations? 

The Wikipedia article lists Hebrew, Klingon, and Esperanto as having unofficial versions of the Book of Mormon (as in, somebody not connected to the Church translated them). I assume the lack of an official Hebrew translation stems from the sensitivities involved with proselytizing in Israel and all the hullabaloo around obtaining permission for the Jerusalem Center.

Comments

6 responses to “When are We “Done” with Book of Mormon Translations?”

  1. Not a Cougar

    Great article. Having served a mission in the Philippines, a country with something like 180+ different dialects (with some of those being incredibly niche), this was a topic of some interest to those of us who lived in and served there. The Church has translated the Book of Mormon into eight different dialects and having the Book of Mormon in specific dialect was in my opinion not really as helpful as you might expect it to be.

    The first reason is that the translators tried as much as possible to use only words from the target language. While that would seem to be the ideal, the problem with that approach is that isn’t how the vast majority of Filipinos use their local dialect. English, Spanish, Tagalog and even other dialect loan words are extremely common in every Filipino dialect with which I am even passingly familiar and it was a rather common experience for us to have an investigator read a verse from the Book of Mormon, ask them what it meant and be met with a shy shrug and an apology that the words used were “too deep” for them to readily comprehend. In attempt to keep the translation “pure,” the translators unwittingly made the Book of Mormon unintelligible to the target audience.

    Second, no one, and I mean no one used the translated Book of Mormon or the recommended Bible translation at church. Everyone used English scriptures. Investigators who brought their copy of the Book of Mormon quickly hid or discarded it when they realized that by having it they stuck out as an outsider at best and unintelligent at worst. This had the occasional knock on effect of self-elimination from further investigation due to embarrassment at not reading and speaking English well, which of course is the whole reason for the Book of Mormon translation effort in the first place.

  2. Jonathan Green

    First, Bavarian, lol. Sometimes a dialect really is just a dialect. Dialect literature exists, even devotional literature, but I can’t imagine more than a few dozen people, if that, who would benefit from a Bavarian Book of Mormon.

    Second, I’ve heard that the Church has tried to survey what languages people actually use at home, and found a lot more than it expected – like several hundred more. What to do about that is a good question.

    Third, as N. A. Cougar points out, things get complicated. Sometimes English, or the educational language, or a lingua franca, or the colonial language works well enough. But in other parts of the world, worship in those languages can feel alienating. People know they’re supposed to know English, but don’t, or not as well as they should, and are self-conscious about it, while worship in their native language is much more meaningful to them.

    Fourth, while a lot of smaller languages will go extinct, we can also expect some new creole languages to arise. At least one of the languages into which the Book of Mormon has been translated is only a century old.

  3. jc

    Serious question… I know persons in my ward who are not very literate through no fault of their own. They read the children’s version of the BoM. Do other recent translations use a more common and understandable language than our English BoM that use King James English? It have seriously wondered if the BoM needs to be revised into more modern English, maybe like the RLDS church has done

  4. Stephen C

    @Not a Cougar: Thanks for your on-the-ground insights, those are very important points. I ran into a similar situation where I was involved in translating a survey instrument into Yiddish, but when we tested it we found out that it was in British Yiddish, which is different from Rockland County Yiddish which is different from Israel Yiddish, so if you count up all the minor variations on dialects and on-the-street uses of various loanwords, the number of “languages” explodes.

    @Jonathan: The Bavarian was half tongue-in-cheek. I hadn’t even heard of it before now so I assumed it was just a minor variation on German.

    Yes, we will have more languages develop in the meantime, but my understanding of the literature is that the consensus is that there will be a dramatic loss of linguistic diversity due to globalization over the next hundred years.

    @JC: I vaguely recall hearing that the Church has actually come out against modern-English translations of the BoM, but I can’t give you a cite. I’m not sure if that’s a good call or not. I mean, for years Europeans knew the Bible mostly through plays. But no, I don’t know if the newer translations try to find a KJV analog in that language, or whether they take a more NIV (I think it’s the NIV?) approach to make it more comprehensible.

  5. CHAD NIELSEN

    It might vary from language to language, but I believe that the BoM translations generally try to land on being readable rather than lofty.

    As you indicated, Stephen, I’m not aware of the Church doing a modern English translation of the Book of Mormon, and the handbook has historically directed church leaders to resist anything like that. They did put out an app specifically for the BoM that uses a more modern Bible translation (NASV, I think) in the introductory materials, which I find exciting.

  6. Kent Larsen

    Stephen, where does D&C 90:11 fit in with this? It seems like a clear mandate to cover all L1 languages, doesn’t it?

    Also, I can’t help but mention that we covered some of this territory a “few” years ago (https://timesandseasons.org/index.php/2008/11/each-in-his-own-language/)

    And, fwiw, one possible language on the Iberian peninsula might qualify for your European language question: Galician — the language of the northwestern area of Spain — the area north of Portugal. The language is a mix of Portuguese and Spanish with some unusual spelling variations (the use of the letter “x” is notable). Wikipedia claims 3 million speakers (I don’t have access to Ethnologue beyond the free page, which puts Galician in the less than helpful 1 million to 1 billion category). But I admit that (thanks largely to Francisco Franco) virtually all speakers are also fluent in Spanish.

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