Latin Book of Mormon

Okay, so normally our posts are fairly ambiguous as to authorship, but for this one, yeah, it's me, Dave, doing the typing here. I'm the Classical Studies nerd, and I have no shame in being so.

With that being said, I mostly want to post this blog so that if there is anyone else out there on the internet like me who would like to put something like this together, I personally think it would be fantastic. In a nutshell, I want to build some kind of collaborative project, probably through Google Docs (because let's face it, I'm a big fan of our benevolent Google overlords and I love that they own pretty much everything in my life) to translate the Book of Mormon into Latin.

Let me first answer every piece of naysaying I've encountered elsewhere on the internet:

Ummm . . . Latin is a dead language. What would be the point? 
I'm so glad you asked. First let me say what the point ISN'T.  The point would NOT be to create a definitive version of the Book of Mormon that could be handed out while tracting, should you happen to run across an ancient Roman who lets you in for lemonade and cookies. Obviously this would have no value whatsoever in proselyting. To be fair, neither would a version of the Book of Mormon in Dothraki, Quenya or Klingon (though can you IMAGINE how epic some of the Alma chapters would sound in Klingon? Oh yeah. Somebody make that happen).  The point of the translation would actually be the translation itself. The existence of the Book of Mormon as a reference tool for those who want to learn Latin, and who want to do it by immersing themselves in scripture. Yes, you can do it with the Vulgate Bible as well, but come on, wouldn't you rather do it with the Book of Mormon?

Ummm . . . Isn't that kind of . . . just a little bit blasphemous? 
I don't personally think so. I've always found that translating anything from one language into another, just as a cognitive exercise, forces you to really examine the meaning of the words you're saying, stripping away anything formulaic or repetitive about it so you get to the bare meaning of what you're dealing with. In this way, I hope to make my attempts at translation into an exercise not just of linguistics, but prayer and contemplation. If I were translating Harry Potter (which has already been done, mad props to whoever managed that) then yeah, I would want to get the words right and I'd feel some obligation to convey the right gist of the sentences, but the scriptures? Yeah, that's pressure. You'd better make sure you get that right.  You miss an accent or a particle somewhere and suddenly you end up with sentences like Thou Shalt Kill.

So that's what I want to do. I'll make it a personal project on my own if I have to, just for fun and for my own education, but since I'm just learning the language and I know the scriptures are far from the most simplistic pieces of text even to understand, let alone translate, I'm hoping that somewhere out there, another language nerd is sitting back thinking "Wouldn't it be great if the Book of Mormon was in Latin?" And they find this post. So there we go. Translating the Book of Mormon into Latin. I want to make a go of it. Who's with me?