Sitting between bookends atop a filing cabinet a few feet from my office is an assembly of books, all with the same title and content but each one rendered in a different language. “Le Livre de Mormon.” “Das Buch Mormon.” “El Libro de Mormón.” There are several in non-Latin scripts. Chinese in simplified characters. Russian in its Cyrillic. Japanese with its blend of ancient and modern alphabets. A few are in languages most people haven’t heard of. Quechua. Chamorro. Fante. The Book of Mormon-- translated fully or partly into more than a hundred languages and with 150 million copies in print to date - may be the most readily identifiable factor that sets members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints apart from other Christians.
