Ever been in one of the few LDS stores outside the United States? or in countries that don’t speak English?<\/p>\n
The selection can be quite discouraging. When I visited the store near the S\u00c3\u00a3o Paulo Temple in Brazil a few years ago, they carried a few books in English, a lot of art, trinkets and items with little or no language-specific content, and a handful of books in Portuguese. From what I’ve seen in online stores for other languages, the situation is similar elsewhere.<\/p>\n
This is really not surprising, when you think about it. Language-specific materials are usually only produced by the Church, and never in sufficient quantities to stock or even support an LDS store. Members generally can only purchase those materials available through LDS Church Distribution in their country.<\/p>\n
But, I don’t make this observation to point out the difficulties that Church members face when they don’t speak English. Instead, I want to ask what cultural products should be modified for other languages, and how that should happen.<\/p>\n
Both here on Times and Seasons and on my blogging home, A Motley Vision<\/a>, what Mormon culture is and what it includes have been discussed. I argued last December<\/a> that some Mormon culture was not only inevitable, but vital to the success of the Church. <\/p>\n I was particularly impressed by Wilfried Decoo’s post Mormon identity and culture<\/a> from last March. There Wilfried drew a distinction between the gospel culture and local cultures, the non-Mormon environment that most members live in, and suggested that Church leaders will need to preserve many elements of Mormon culture so that they remain consistent everywhere while evaluating elements of local culture to make sure that they do not conflict with the gospel.<\/p>\n My own interests lie in elements of Mormon culture that mostly didn’t enter into Wilfried’s analysis. When Church members create their own cultural expressions, i.e., when they write a novel or a song or paint an image or collaborate on a film, no one expects the blessing of church leaders. Yet these expressions are distributed at least among English-speaking members, and increasingly among non-English-speaking members, where local members go so far as to make their own translations at times.<\/p>\n The Church has its own distribution system for Church-approved materials–presumably those items that Wilfred suggests should be coordinated to avoid conflicting doctrinal beliefs in different places. But this limitation to approved materials leaves out a lot of the 5,000 to 10,000 items from a variety of labels, publishers and producers available to members in English.<\/p>\n Here in the U.S. we distribute many items not distributed by the Church through a system of LDS bookstores largely led and controlled by Deseret Book. [I addressed the problems this causes in a three-part post on A Motley Vision here<\/a>, here<\/a> and here<\/a>]. These stores cover the Mormon corridor well, the rest of the western U.S. adequately, for the most part, portions of the rest of the U.S. occasionally, and the rest of the world in a spotty fashion.<\/p>\n But beyond the problems of coverage, this distribution system is hampered by the same kind of problem that Wilfried saw among local leaders, who “in order to fashion an extremely standardized and thus safe ‘gospel culture,’ impose restrictions well into the realm of the acceptable.” LDS stores simply don’t carry works that they believe any customer might object to as “inappropriate.”<\/p>\n Outside of this system, some material is distributed directly and at conferences and conventions. The rise of the Internet as a distribution method has helped this direct distribution significantly, but even this distribution is hampered, principally by the difficulty in letting members know that an item exists.<\/p>\n In a few cases, some materials have been distributed through channels that are not specifically Mormon, often when the appeal is wider than to just Church members, or when the distribution channel is highly automated and no longer requires intervention of a human evaluator to judge what should be included. However these channels are also hampered by the difficulty in letting members know that these materials are available.<\/p>\n The situation is even more complex for members of the Church who don’t speak English. Except for LDS Church distribution, there aren’t many options for distributing privately produced Mormon works. I’m sure that xerox copies of shorter material (the kind that were collected in Especially for Mormons<\/i>) are passed among members at Church and at LDS functions, and sent person to person by email, when access is prevalent enough. But these methods aren’t very reliable, and I don’t think they work well for longer works.o<\/p>\n Above all for these members, we need to remember the difficulty of translation. The going rate for translation is something like $0.10 to $0.12 a word (often long manuscripts can be done for less than that, but certainly not for less than $0.05 a word). When a book-length work is 100,000 words ($10,000 at the going rate), who will pay for the translation?<\/p>\n Given these factors it might seem impossible for Mormon cultural materials to be distributed among members who do not speak English (outside of LDS Church distribution). Even within the English-speaking portion of the Church, I find the situation frustrating<\/a> because of the impediments to wide distribution. So I wonder if there isn’t a way of distributing Mormon cultural works that solves some of these problems, especially those faced by members who do not speak English.<\/p>\n The current model assumes a high degree of conformity and is centered on Deseret Book. For non-English speakers, it is assumed that materials will be translated from English and distributed through local LDS stores.<\/p>\n But there are alternatives to this model. One often suggested idea is to skip Deseret Book and the current LDS stores in favor of distributing through the channels available in the U.S. The rise of the Internet has led to a class of online stores (such as Amazon.com) that list virtually everything — they make almost no judgment about each item, not even whether an item will even sell. Since everything is listed, it is easy to be included. LDS items are listed, of course, but not always as LDS items. It is often impossible to know that an item is in fact Mormon from its listing on these stores. This idea also faces problems outside the U.S., where national distribution systems still make judgments about whether an item will sell or is of interest to their customers, and where online stores aren’t as frequently used.<\/p>\n