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Honesty
in Translations (c) 2007 David Grant
Stewart, Sr. Over forty years ago I
read this interesting observation by Joseph Smith: The
Germans are an exalted people. The old German translators are the most nearly
correct -- most honest of any of the translators; and therefore I get
testimony to bear me out in the revelations that I have preached for the last
fourteen years. The old German, Latin, Greek and Hebrew translations all say
it is true: they cannot be impeached, and therefore I am in good company.[1] I wondered at the time why
honesty should ever be an issue in translations. After nearly forty years as
a professional translator, I begin to understand what he was talking about. Is it honest for a scholar
to say: "I am not going to translate the Does he not really mean:
"I am not able to translate the Is it not only dishonest,
but irrational, to say, "I am not going to translate the Is there any honesty in
arrogating to yourself knowledge that you do not have? Does not any "scholar" who
dismisses ancient relics or records out of hand because he does not
understand them, in fact discredit himself by failing to be honest enough to
admit that they could be authentic but that he does not of himself possess
sufficient knowledge or intelligence to conduct the basic and irrefutable
test of translation? Is plagiarism dishonest?
Let’s use the dictionary definition so we put on the table what we are
talking about: "plagiarize: (L. plagiarius, kidnapper) to take (ideas,
writings, etc.) from (another) and pass them off as one’s own."
[Webster’s New World Dictionary, second college edition. Yes, I know it’s
old, but so am I.] If I take a word, phrase, or sentence from another
translator and use it as if it were my own original translation, without
admitting where I got it from, am I plagiarizing? Am I dishonest? If the
word, phrase, or sentence is the original thought of another, Yes! I have sat
in Sunday School classes and heard Daniel Ludlow’s translation of
"Liahona" explained without any attribution to The King James translators
claimed they had diligently compared other translations. Did none of them
know German? Did none of them compare Luther’s great work? If they had, would
it [Luther’s translation] still be the best translation in any language
today? A very rampant form of
dishonesty is to take someone’s translation of a single word - like Earlier in these
installments I showed you instances where modern Egyptologists have used the
translations of E.A. Wallis Budge word for word, even making the same
mistakes, not only without any attribution to Budge, but even claiming that
"Budge is out of date" and "anyone who cites Budge as an
authority discredits himself." Are they not, then, institutionalizing
the dishonesty of plagiarism? Recall the translation
from the Internet of the Las Lunas Decalogue.
It does not take much, simply by looking at the last few characters of the
text, to determine familiar words and phrases that identify this as the Ten
Commandments. How much of a temptation would it be simply to copy the
translation given in the KJV, rewording it so it would sound original, and
post it as his own translation? Recall the first line: 'I
am Yahweh your God that brought you out of the lands of This is what you would
expect it to say, isn’t it? It does not. Nowhere in the text are the words
"brought," "lands," nor " In the KJV we have: I
[am] the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the Thou
shalt have no other gods before me. Exodus
20:2-3 Realizing that this was an
abbreviated version, the "translator" struck off the last phrase,
"out of the house of bondage." On the one hand, as noted,
there is no, or I did not see any, " Is this
"translator" honest? In the second verse, he
has: You shall not have any other gods besides me. Is this any different from
the New English version? The Hebrew suffix -KA denotes the second person
singular, not plural. It should have been rendered "thou,", etc.
But the bigger problem here is that there is no "You shall not
have." The Las Lunas text says "There shall not be." In that same installment I
gave you a conversion chart so that you can take that unknown script and
convert every character to a known Hebrew character and look up every word
for yourself and draw your own conclusions. You can easily verify for
yourself whether the character equivalents are correct, or any and every part
of the translations. The detailed explanations for my choice of every word
are given where I
translated the Ten Commandments from the traditional Masoretic Hebrew. These are all small
potatoes. One woman went for the big time. She came up with a completely
different translation! A story of some party or other having nothing
whatsoever to do with the Ten Commandments. Do you wonder what could be going
on in such a person’s brain? I wonder if she could "restore" one of
my Model T Fords and come up with a Rolls-Royce. I have seen photographs of
the so-called "Manti
Plates." Are they authentic? I do not know. But I recognized some of
the same characters as are on the If I am not able to
translate the Manti plates, does this mean they are a fraud? No, this simply
means I do not have enough knowledge and intelligence to translate them.
Perhaps someone with more knowledge and intelligence can. That would be all I
would be able to say about them. Of course, there are cases like the Voynich
manuscript. It is easy to demonstrate that such character sequences cannot
convey information. This is the difference in computer terms between data and
information. Random character strings are data. Information encoded in
character strings is data. But random character strings are not information,
nor can they ever be. Information requires order, the result of applied
intelligence. There is no order, intelligence, nor information in the Voynich
manuscript, nor in the psychotic illustrations. Henry Ford said
"History is bunk." Is this true? What is history? History is not
what happened. It is the written record of what happened. The word comes from
the French histoire, which means a story. Generally, eyewitness accounts are
true. The speculations which ignore the eyewitness accounts are written by
storytellers. They are just what Henry Ford said they were. I collect relics and
antiques not because they may have value or may be a good investment,
although that helps sometimes, but because they contain information. I have
an 1844 pepperbox, the ancestor of the revolver, very much like the one that
was handed to Joseph Smith in Carthage Jail. I can appreciate how difficult
it was for him to defend his companions with such a weapon. My 1730 Swiss
Septuagint is extremely useful at times. One of the most powerful
learning tools is translation. Even so, English is such an impoverished
language that much must be explained, and even then something is generally
left out because it can not be expressed. Here is an insightful
remark by Lucie Lamy in her Egyptian Mysteries: "The
First Dynasty tombs were pillaged from earliest antiquity, and only rare
vestiges of their contents have been preserved. These few remains, however,
bear witness to an astonishing degree of civilization." Another:
"the Third Dynasty tomb of Hesy, an inexhaustible source of information,
allows us to conclude that the measures of cylindrical capacity established
on the sub-multiples of 30, 20, 10, and 64 impose the use of the cube roots
of 2, 3, 5, and 10 as well as the coefficient pi." These are valid points. If
Ms. Lamy elsewhere in her book says something I may not agree with, does this
discredit her? If there are unwarranted speculations or false translations in
a magazine like Ancient American,
does this discredit it? I have said before that that magazine is of great
value if only because of the photographs of ancient relics that are shown to
us so that we may judge for ourselves. Is greater respect due to a
publication which takes it upon itself to be the judge of what we are
permitted to see and what is withheld? When panning for gold, do the
particles of sand and rocks which need to be washed out discredit the
goldbearing stream? Any person who makes
original source material, whether in the form of photographs, accurate line
drawings, or transcriptions and translations such as Sir E.A. Wallis Budge
has performed a great service to his fellow men. Even if current trends or
speculations tend to lead us away from something someone like Budge says in
one of his books, is it indeed possible that this apparent "error"
of his ways automatically discredits everything else he ever said? Is it possible
that any scholar could be absolutely wrong about everything - so wrong that
"anyone who cites Budge [or anyone else not basking in the radiance of
our favor at the moment] as an authority [on anything!] discredits
himself"? Or in fact has such a claimant done nothing more than
discredit himself as an utter bigot after the manner of the infamous
Inquisition - anyone who disagrees with anything I say is consigned to the
flames, and all his works with him, so that no one at any time or place in
the present or future may ever have the privilege of consulting him or his
works for himself in the light of his own knowledge and intelligence and
making his own free-will conclusions? When I am attacked by
those for whom sneers and name-calling are accepted as legal tender in lieu
of sound reasoning and accurate knowledge, I am reminded of those mentioned
in the Scriptures who were angry with the truth pronounced by inspired men
sent to them "because it did destroy their craft." Is it a mere coincidence
that the very scholars who are kindly made available to us by Dover
Publishing with its excellent taste in reprints - such as Budge and Mercer -
are the very ones "discredited" by "scholars" yet the
greatest scholars in their own field such as Champollion and Erman have not
only never been translated into English, but are even now completely out of
print? Or does this simply reaffirm what we have noticed since we were
children playing in the schoolyard at recess, that the snob can always tell
you who and what are not "in" [namely everybody and everything
except himself] but somehow can never condescend to get around to telling you
what is "in" in a way that is accessible to you so that you may
judge for yourself? I want no power or
authority over anybody. The object of a translator is to simplify, not to
complicate. The object of a translator is to make knowledge available to
everybody so that everyone may judge and know for himself without being told
what to think. I have nothing to hide. I want to put everything on the table.
I am trying to do this with all of these translations to the extent that
foreign character fonts will permit. I want you to see for yourself and judge
for yourself whether my translations are correct or not. I appreciate all
those who have created all these fonts which make this possible to the extent
that it is. Translating things like the Burrows Cave tablets is always
gruelingly difficult and mentally exhausting, so you can imagine the effect
an occasional kind word or breath of appreciation by the returning one out of
ten healed from the leprosy of ignorance has upon a poor tired old man.
"He that receiveth all things with thankfulness shall be made
glorious." William Tyndale and others
were burned at the stake for the heinous crime of translating Holy Writ into
a language the average housewife could understand. This was a great threat,
you know, taking power away from the false priests and making the housewife
free to do her own interpretations of Scripture in her own language. It
wasn’t about Right and Truth. It was about power. Sir E.A. Wallis Budge has
done the same thing with Egyptian Hieroglyphs, but he is not available for
the stake. All they can do is "discredit" him, and so they have.
What is it the "scholars" are trying to hide? Have we really made
progress since the "Holy Inquisition"? Or do we still do the same
things but in the different ways that are available to us? The Crush, grind, stomp, burn,
incinerate, scatter ashes to the winds. There. Now that that’s
done - but wait! Here’s some Olmec writing. It seems to look like the I think I’ll go photograph
some of these |
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