Thinking that perhaps this was because in Spanish the explanations of terms weren’t as necessary, I worked through Isaiah 19 note by note, and found that 13 references to other scriptures were omitted in Spanish that were there in English and three references to articles in the Topical Guide were left out that were there in English. And Isaiah 19 has 29 footnotes in English and just 16 in Spanish. Pulling a couple of chapters at random, 2 Chronicles 12 has 7 footnotes in English, but just 5 in Spanish. I was also surprised when I saw noticeably fewer footnotes than in the English edition. In terms of content, I expected that the notes would be basically the same, and that the Bible Dictionary/Topical Guide we are used to in English would have some equivalent in Spanish (The Church has provided a combination of these two, called the Guía para el Estudio de las Escrituras), but I was surprised to find that it was not included in this edition of the Bible! The chapter headings do seem to be straight translations of the headings in the English edition, as expected. In other respects, the design is essentially the same as the LDS English edition. The overall feel is lighter and more airy than either the English or the previous Spanish edition, and I love the fact that poetry is rendered as poetry (seen in Pslams, Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, and scattered other places). All in all, this makes this edition much larger and heavier than the non-LDS Spanish edition that it replaced.
In the end this is probably the largest factor that makes this edition about 25% longer than the English edition (I do know that Spanish tends to be somewhat longe than English - but its not 25% longer), despite the fact that the page size of my English edition is substantially smaller. I prefer more compact type, all else being equal. I’m sure that the designers had good reason for this, but for me it was a little annoying. It looks like it is perhaps 14 point, where my english edition is more like 10 point type. The first thing I noticed when I opened this bible for the first time was the size of the type. But I do have some thoughts about the design and footnotes of this edition. I’m not going to dive into any details about the quality of the translation, since I don’t feel qualified to do that (I’d hesitate to do it even in my mission language, Portuguese, despite the fact that I regularly translate in that language and speak it on a daily basis). So I thought I would pass on my impressions. My copy of the new LDS edition of the Bible in Spanish arrived yesterday, one of the 750,000 copies printed recently (according to a contact I have in the Church department that prints these materials).
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