With pride I tell those who come to my office that a Lamanite is a descendant of one Lehi who left Jerusalem six hundred years before Christ and with his family crossed the mighty deep and landed in America. And Lehi and his family became the ancestors of all of the Indian and Mestizo tribes in North and South and Central America and in the islands of the sea, for in the middle of their history there were those who left America in ships of their making and went to the islands of the sea.

Not until the revelations of Joseph Smith, bringing forth the Book of Mormon, did any one know of these migrants. It was not known before, but now the question is fully answered. Now the Lamanites number about sixty million; they are in all of the states of America from Tierra del Fuego all the way up to Point Barrows, and they are in nearly all the islands of the sea from Hawaii south to southern New Zealand. The Church is deeply interested in all Lamanites because of these revelations and because of this great Book of Mormon, their history that was written on plates of gold and deposited in the hill. The translation by the Prophet Joseph Smith revealed a running history for one thousand years—six hundred years before Christ until four hundred after Christ—a history of these great people who occupied this land for that thousand years. Then for the next fourteen hundred years, they lost much of their high culture. The descendants of this mighty people were called Indians by Columbus in 1492 when he found them here.

Spencer W. Kimball, “Of Royal Blood,” Ensign, July 1971.

http://www.latter-daysaints.ru/scriptures/bom.html

It doesn’t say anything about Lamanites, which doesn’t surprise me on a site that is focused on Eastern Europeans. Unfortunately, I don’t have access to my copy of the Russian Book of Mormon to see what the intro says: my bet is that Bookslinger will find his copy sooner than I’ll get hold of mine again. I’m also not surprised that my copy of the Book of Mormon Stories doesn’t mention it — I don’t have time to hunt through my copy of the Institute manual, though I imagine there’s something about the Lamanites there.

And yeah, Manuel is right: “the same as the Bible” or “comparable to the Bible” wouldn’t be hard in any Indo-European language, at least. It’s a basic kind of thing, comparison: I find it hard to believe that there are many modern languages where there’s no way of doing it. Bablefish doesn’t have a problem with any of the languages it does, though I can’t tell whether the Asian ones are intelligible or not. The hardest part would be picking the word for “Bible,” which I’m sure Protestant missionaries figured out long before the Church started expanding the missionary program.

In regards to your comment:

the sentence, which originally contained “as does the bible” did not translate well into other languages…

I have been a translator for several years. I translated professionally for Johnson and Johnson and I currently work translating and editing publications for a BYU department. I do not see how the line “as does the bible” could represent any challenge in the translation process. It is a short and simple statement. I think there must be other reasons that the line was left out.

Regards,

Manuel

The second sentence, however, goes beyond simply referring to both books as scriptural canon. The 1981 version implies that each book seperately “contains the fulness of the everlasting gospel.” The updated version, however, makes it clear that the Book of Mormon “contains the fulness of the everlasting gospel,” but omits any such claim about the Bible.

The only way I see your theory working is if we proceed with the assumption that all books of scripture individually contain the fulness of the everlasting gospel, a proposition I do not subscribe to.