{"id":49075,"date":"2025-02-08T13:38:22","date_gmt":"2025-02-08T20:38:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=49075"},"modified":"2025-02-08T13:38:22","modified_gmt":"2025-02-08T20:38:22","slug":"portuguese-panic-for-the-book-of-mormon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2025\/02\/portuguese-panic-for-the-book-of-mormon\/","title":{"rendered":"Portuguese Panic for the Book of Mormon"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A key moment in the Church\u2019s establishment in different locations and cultures\u2014including among countries like Brazil, where the Church officially has over one million members\u2014is 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 <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fromthedesk.org\/how-was-the-book-of-mormon-translated-into-portuguese\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Book of Mormon in Portuguese<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> 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 <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From the Desk<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"wp-embedded-content\" data-secret=\"Lda97tXZOS\"><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fromthedesk.org\/how-was-the-book-of-mormon-translated-into-portuguese\/\">How Was the Book of Mormon Translated Into Portuguese?<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"wp-embedded-content\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts\" security=\"restricted\" style=\"position: absolute; visibility: hidden;\" title=\"&#8220;How Was the Book of Mormon Translated Into Portuguese?&#8221; &#8212; From the Desk\" src=\"https:\/\/www.fromthedesk.org\/how-was-the-book-of-mormon-translated-into-portuguese\/embed\/#?secret=Befa2RT7Vj#?secret=Lda97tXZOS\" data-secret=\"Lda97tXZOS\" width=\"500\" height=\"282\" frameborder=\"0\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">With very few members or missionaries who spoke Portuguese, the Church struggled to expand. For over a decade, German remained the official mission language.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Thus, at the dawn of WWII, the mission president in Brazil had a background with Germany more than with Latin America:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Seegmiller and many of the missionaries were not as familiar with the Portuguese translation of the Book of Mormon as a result.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The Portuguese translation had been created in the late 1930s, but didn\u2019t have a wide distribution:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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 \u201cGuida\u201d 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. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">A second independent translation was completed by Williams Lane, a contracted professional translator affiliated with Mackenzie College in S\u00e3o Paulo, a Presbyterian school founded by Lane\u2019s grandfather. M\u00e1rio Pedroso, a student of Lane\u2019s, served as the editor charged with combining the two translations.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By 1943, Seegmiller was working to respond to the war, but was alarmed by reports of concerns about the Book of Mormon translation:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Seegmiller\u2019s 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 \u201ca great many very flagrant errors in doctrine\u201d in the Portuguese Book of Mormon.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Seegmiller also heard rumors that the translation was done by a female Catholic scholar and an apostate who intentionally \u201cinjected some Catholic doctrine\u201d into the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fromthedesk.org\/come-follow-me-book-of-mormon\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Book of Mormon<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Specifically,\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Seegmiller suspected that \u201cCatholic doctrine\u201d had found a way into the Portuguese Book of Mormon text and that the book taught \u201cthe wrong conception of Deity and the Godhead.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">He identified four specific examples and predicted that \u201ca great many more mistakes\u201d would be discovered.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In reality, the errors were magnified far beyond the reality of the situation:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The missing verse was an unintentional typesetting error.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The supposed Catholic expression had been imagined.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The denial of the doctrine of baptism by immersion was overstated.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">However, the Portuguese translation did add the word \u201cbeing\u201d to some verses about the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost being \u201cone,\u201d though it did not do so consistently.\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Still, the reports sparked a strong reaction:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Church officials were greatly alarmed and deemed it \u201cunwise to distribute books containing such flagrant errors,\u201d given \u201cthe translation regarding the Godhead and the ordinance of baptism.\u201d Seegmiller suggested destroying every available copy of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fromthedesk.org\/come-follow-me-book-of-mormon\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Book of Mormon<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> in Portuguese, but the First Presidency urged caution and instead suggested including notes in the margins to clarify mistranslations.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In their reply, they promised to take steps to retranslate the book. \u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Translators now receive specific instructions on how to \u201cpreserve the doctrine\u201d of the English text.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">More broadly, the incident raised concerns about the nature of existing translations of the Book of Mormon:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Up until this time, Church leadership had only been minimally involved in the translation of the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fromthedesk.org\/come-follow-me-book-of-mormon\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Book of Mormon<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Seegmiller\u2019s letter raised the real possibility that doctrinal errors might exist in other translations as well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">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\u2019s Translation Department.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This Translation Department has standardized the process, greatly improving speed and accuracy while giving guidance on how to \u201cpreserve the doctrine\u201d 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:<\/span><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">[I] was only allowed to use the English Book of Mormon to do the translation. We don&#8217;t use the Russian or other languages to translate from. I also had a dictionary and a three-volume lexicon. \u2026 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 &#8220;child&#8221; and the number of times it came up, the meaning, etc. \u2026 I had to maintain consistency. So if the word &#8220;minister&#8221; 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, <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Voice of the Saints in Mongolia<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> (Provo, Utah: BYU RSC, 2022), 159.)<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This highlights how far the process of oversight for translation had come since the 1940s.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For more on the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.fromthedesk.org\/how-was-the-book-of-mormon-translated-into-portuguese\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">translation of the Book of Mormon into Portuguese<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, head on over to <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From the Desk<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> to read the full interview with Jeremy Talmage.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A key moment in the Church\u2019s establishment in different locations and cultures\u2014including among countries like Brazil, where the Church officially has over one million members\u2014is 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10397,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2890],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-49075","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-desk"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49075","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10397"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49075"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49075\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49076,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49075\/revisions\/49076"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49075"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49075"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49075"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}