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Due to ignorance, many people believe that Joseph "translated" the record using his own words. This however is not what his wife or other witnesses saw Joseph do. Apparently, Joseph had an aptitude for peering into a "peep-stone," much as Joseph of old did with his silver cup. (Genesis 41:2,5,15)
Thus, God did allow Joseph the use of this interest - not for gold digging anymore - but rather for bringing forth the already translated English words of the book, from heaven to earth.
This is what Emma told her son Joseph III about the process:
"When acting as his scribe, your father would dictate to me hour after hour; and when returning after meals, or after interruptions, he would at once begin where he had left off, without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him. This was a usual thing for him to do. It would have been improbable that a learned man could do this; and, for one so ignorant and unlearned as he was, it was simply impossible." (Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 1:542)
This is what Royal Skousen of the Critical Text Project of The Book of Mormon said:
I began to see considerable evidence for the traditional interpretation that witnesses of the translation process claimed: (1) the text was given word for word, (2) Book of Mormon names were frequently spelled out the first time they occurred in the text, and (3) during dictation there was no rewriting of the text except to correct errors in taking down the dictation. Joseph Smith was literally reading off an already composed English-language text. The evidence in the manuscripts and in the language of the text itself supports the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon was a precisely determined text. I do not consider this conclusion apologetic, but instead as one demanded by the evidence.
The opposing viewpoint, that Joseph Smith got ideas and he translated them into his own English, cannot be supported by the manuscript and textual evidence. The only substantive argument for this alternative view has been the nonstandard nature of the text, with its implication that God would never speak ungrammatical English, so the nonstandard usage must be the result of Joseph Smith putting the ideas he received into his own language. Yet with the recent finding that the original vocabulary of the text appears to be dated from the 1500s and 1600s (not the 1800s), we now need to consider the possibility that the ungrammaticality of the original text may also date from that earlier period of time, not necessarily from Joseph’s own time and place. Joseph Smith is not the author of the Book of Mormon, nor is he actually the translator. Instead, he was the revelator: through him the Lord revealed the English-language text (by means of the interpreters, later called the Urim and Thummim, and the seer stone). Such a view is consistent, I believe, with Joseph’s use elsewhere of the verb translate to mean ‘transmit’ and the noun translation to mean ‘transmission’ (as in the eighth Article of Faith).
The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone was found in 1799, in Rosetta Egypt, and is now housed at the British Museum. The stone dated 196 BC is significant because it was the key that unlocked the ancient Egyptian language and culture. In the following picture you can see three different languages inscribed - hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek:
As can be seen, the hieroglyphs take up less space than the other two languages to say the same thing. This was the reason Book of Mormon authors wrote in Reformed Egyptian - to save space. When Joseph dictated the already translated Egyptian into English, it is reported he saw the Egyptian characters on one line with the English words underneath - just like we see on the Rosetta Stone.
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The Translation Process
