Wait, What Are Translations? A Brief Explanation, Because Apparently Not Everyone Is Obsessed With Adam Miller

Adam Miller, the patron saint of this blog, wrote in my favorite of his books, Letters to a Young Mormon, “You and I must translate these books again. Word by word, line by line, verse by verse, chapter by chapter, God wants the whole thing translated once more, and this time he wants it translated into your native tongue, inflected by your native concerns, and written in your native flesh.”

Translating has become one of my favorite ways of studying the scriptures. I take the words in the scriptures and write them the way that I would if God had given them to me, now, instead of a prophet hundreds of years ago. This means I have to wrestle with them, to study and decide what I think meekness means, or what is charity if I don’t let myself hide behind the word itself?

It’s a different thing to translate the Doctrine and Covenants. The other books of scripture were written in languages I don’t speak or read (Aramaic, Greek, Hebrew, Egyptian, some pidgin developed in the Americas) and they were written thousands of years ago by people who have long since met their maker.

The D&C was written in English. The words I read on a page didn’t cross through hundreds of years of abridgers and translators. They didn’t have men of God, scholars, generals, and kings making decisions about which meaning of each word to prioritize; I read them as they were scrawled by a prophet of God not quite two hundred years ago in my own language.

What, then, is the purpose of Miller-ish translating when the scriptures are already in my “native tongue"? Honestly, it’s much more for me than for you. When I translate the scriptures, I have to think more deeply about what they mean. I chase down rabbit holes after the etymology of “grace,” the evolution of roads as a scriptural metaphor. I comb through wikipedia pages, old dictionaries, theological articles to trying to figure out what these words could mean to me, today, one hundred and ninety years after they were first written.

I would love (love, love, love) to see any translations you do too. If you’d like to share, you can leave them in the comments, email me, message me, whatever works. And, if you’re just interested in exploring the idea further, Patrick Mason does an absolutely fabulous translation of D&C 1 that I cannot recommend enough. (Thanks for sending it to me, Brian!)