how to translate 'restoration' and different views on religion

There are a couple of other things that I’d wanted to write about today, but a memory suddenly popped into my head just now, and I wanted to get it written down while it was still fresh.

About a year into the COVID-19 pandemic, I was working with a Mormon studies organization to collect stories from members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Community of Christ, and other denominations descended from Joseph Smith Jr. about their faith experiences over the past year. We had an English-language survey already together, but we wanted to get French, Spanish, and other translations up, too, in the hopes that we could collect stories from a broad range of languages, not just denominations.

Our first French translation of the survey was done by someone affiliated with Community of Christ, so when they translated the term “restoration” (which is important to all these Smith-descended denominations), they used the term « restauration », as is traditional in that tradition. Another native French speaker in the organization saw the translation, though, and raised a concern about that. In LDS circles, “restoration” is translated as « rétablissement », and wanted to change that phrasing (along with some other modifications to the first translation). They reached out to me (rather than the original translator) to argue for their revised translation.

I’m not a native French speaker, but between already doing a fair amount for the project and being reasonably fluent in French, I had some opinions of my own. I was also increasingly affiliated with Community of Christ in my personal life, but I think I managed to keep that out of things—my main concern was that it would be rude to override the first volunteer’s decisions, especially if it could be construed as privileging the largest of the Smith-descended denominations at the expense of one of the smaller ones.

I’ll spare you the details of the back-and-forth as I tried to make that case for keeping our original volunteer’s translation, but at some point, the second volunteer argued that the Louis Segond translation of the Bible (used in both LDS and Community of Christ circles) renders “restoration” as « rétablissement » in Acts 3:21 and that this evidence made « rétablissement » the better translation. That is a pretty solid argument (though partly complicated by the fact that the KJV renders this “restitution,” which isn’t the word that LDS folks use in English), but it didn’t really resolve my underlying concern. My own denominational prejudices aside, my priority was that we weren’t seeing as privileging one denomination’s language over another—not in determining which denomination’s language was a better rendition.

One of the reasons I like remembering this story is because it implicitly highlights two different ways of looking at “the Restoration”—and much of religion, for that matter. Implicit in the second translator’s argument (though not necessarily present in their thinking) is that “the Restoration” is something that was ordained by God from the beginning of time, prophesied throughout the Bible (perhaps most notably in Acts), and then begun by God’s hand through Joseph Smith. It’s kind of a “top-down” view of the Restoration—and religion.

In contrast, for all of my concessions that « retablissement » may well be the better choice (besides what I’ve mentioned above, « restauration » also carries connotations of both a particular period of French royal history… and of the restaurant business), my thinking back in 2021 was that so long as Community of Christ used the word, that’s what mattered for the specific decision we were trying to make, rather than try to “correct” Community of Christ usage. This is a kind of “bottom-up” view of the Restoration—and religion. That is, “the Restoration” is something that a bunch of Americans understood in a certain way in the 19th century (based on, but not limited to, their reading of the Bible), and « la restauration » in Community of Christ-speak is that cultural understanding transplanted to French Polynesia (the historical Francophone center of this denomination) and other Francophone parts of the world.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for anyone who’s read my writing on religion, I prefer the second. I think “the Restoration” is a useful, inspiring idea for my faith and the faith of many people in Community of Christ today. I don’t believe that the founding of this church is something that was prophesied by Isaiah or Peter or anyone else. In my view, “the Restoration” doesn’t have to be the fulfillment of prophecy to be useful—we can (and, in Community of Christ, have) evolve our understanding of the concept away from how it was understood in earlier times—whether that means changing our teachings from what Joseph Smith, Jr., taught or using a different word than the Louis Segond uses in Acts and elsewhere.

• macro
• Communities
• Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
• Community of Christ
• COVID-19 pandemic
• faith transition
• Mormon Studies
• French
• Restoration