Growing up in the Church, most Latter-day Saints learned that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from characters from the golden plates, using a “urim and thummim” looking roughly like a set of spectacles. More recently, however, the narrative has changed to reflect the contemporaneous accounts, that Joseph Smith did not actually read the characters off the plates. Instead, he put a seerstone into a hat, and peering into the hat, he revealed the text of the Book of Mormon. The seerstone in question is the same stone that Joseph Smith used to dig for treasures.
Thus, the Book of Mormon cannot be accurately defined as a “translation” as the term is understood today, but rather, a revealed text using what today would not easily be accepted as a divine process. This challenges many Latter-day Saints to understand how the Book of Mormon can be an ancient work, “translated by the gift and power of God.”
This Gospel Topics Essay addresses the translation of the Book of Mormon.