Comments on: Opposition, 6.1 – 2 Nephi 2:11 in French Translation

By: 2 Nephi 2:11 – Opposition! « Lehi's Discourse

2 Nephi 2:11 – Opposition! « Lehi's Discourse — Sun, 17 Feb 2013 14:51:55 +0000

[...] a history of interpretation, as well as, more radically, the profound instability of this text: see here, here, here, and here. (I might note that I’m currently in the process of transforming these four [...]

By: Opposition, 6.2 – 2 Nephi 2:11 in German Translation « Feast upon the Word Blog

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 13:14:44 +0000

[...] my last post, I addressed the history of the French translation of 2 Nephi 2:11. That history was complicated, [...]

By: LDS Anarchist

LDS Anarchist — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 05:21:17 +0000

That’s what I was going to say, regarding a Hebrew rendering. It seems to me that if you took the text and just translated it into Hebrew, and then translated it back out into modern English, we’d perhaps get a better understanding of the actual meaning.

My mind does this all the time as I read the English version. So, for example, when I read,

“for it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things”

My mind sees the construction as a Hebraism and translates it out into something plainer:

“because it needs to be this way, so that there is an opposition in all things.”

By: joespencer

joespencer — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:26:44 +0000

I was aware that the LDS version never circulated widely (something like 500 copies were printed, and then the project was lifted for a variety of very good reasons). There’s a copy in the Church archives, I’m sure, and likely one at BYU’s archives as well. I once actually had the RLDS version, but I don’t anymore….

By: jacob

jacob — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 21:50:20 +0000

No, and looking online it looks like the RLDS translation is very pricey unless you stumble upon it at DI, and I’m not really sure if there is an LDS translation that is publicly available. I wish I had known this before commenting.

By: joespencer

joespencer — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:31:25 +0000

Interesting idea, Jacob. I can't do anything with Arabic, unfortunately. But I do read Hebrew, so I could do some work on this. To my knowledge, there have been two distinct translations of the Book of Mormon into Hebrew, one by the RLDS. But I don't have ready access to either of these. Do you?

By: jacob

jacob — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 20:14:35 +0000

I wonder how the good folks who cherished their 60′s translation felt about the 1998 translation. I think it would be somewhat frustrating to understand and love a verse one way and then have to completely reevaluate it as you have done so brilliantly. This really gives one pause when thinking in terms of “as far as it is translated correctly.”

I know you mentioned that you are only going to work with German, French, Italian, and Spanish translations, is there any chance you will review the Arabic and Hebrew translations of this verse in the future?

By: joespencer

joespencer — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:06:37 +0000

I wonder. That is, I wonder whether there's an equivalence without loss between "it is necessary that there is X" and "there must necessarily be X." The jury's still out for me. That said, what I think is interesting about the most recent translation of this phrase in French is that it actually moves away from literalism with a one-to-one correspondence (if, that is, you mean one-to-one syntactic correspondence, as I assume). If the two constructions are semantically equivalent, their syntax is clearly distinct, and it's only the earlier translations that modeled syntactic literalism in this particular case (by using a "that"-structure), while the earlier translations were less literal in several other ways.

By: Robert C.

Robert C. — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:53:07 +0000

Fascinating, Joe — truly fascinating. I esp. appreciate this since (1) I don’t know French, and (2) I don’t have the patience or time to do this really careful and detailed analysis of the nuances of the ambiguous grammar….

By: Ben S

Ben S — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 18:25:42 +0000

“Does “it must needs be that there is an opposition in all things” imply that “there must necessarily be an opposition in all things”?”
I think it clearly does, as “needs” is an adverb meaning “necessarily.”
I think the more recent rendering is simply trying to be more literal, with a 1-to-1 correspondence. I don’t see any linguistic advantage, or difference in meaning (served a French mission), but that does seem to be the translation philosophy of the Church in recent years.

By: Opposition, 0 – Series Introduction « Feast upon the Word Blog

Opposition, 0 – Series Introduction « Feast upon the Word Blog — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 13:55:26 +0000

[...] comments Opposition, 6.1 – 2 Nephi 2:11 in French Translation « Feast upon the Word Blog on Opposition, 6.0 – 2 Nephi 2:11 in TranslationOpposition, 0 – Series [...]