The difference between the two translation philosophies can be seen in lots of ways. One is the question of whether it is appropriate (or even permissible) for the translator to add specificity in the translated text. Here’s a simple example in 2 Kings 24:19. I’m quoting first from the NASB, which generally provides a good word-for-word translation of the original text, and then from the NLT (dynamic equivalence):

2 Kings 24:18-19 (NASB95)
¹⁸ Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned eleven years in Jerusalem; and his mother’s name was Hamutal the daughter of Jeremiah of Libnah.
¹⁹ He did evil in the sight of the LORD, according to all that Jehoiakim had done.

2 Kings 24:18-19 (NLT)
¹⁸ Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he became king, and he reigned in Jerusalem eleven years. His mother was Hamutal, the daughter of Jeremiah from Libnah.
¹⁹ But Zedekiah did what was evil in the LORD’s sight, just as Jehoiakim had done.

Look at the first word of v. 19. The NASB translates the Hebrew text literally with the pronoun “He.” Incidentally, all formal-equivalence translations (e.g., KJV, NKJV, RSV, NRSV, ESV; also NIV) join the NASB in rendering it “He.”

The NLT (joined by NCV, TEV; also HCSB) replaces the pronoun with the proper name Zedekiah. These dynamic translations feel free to translate beyond the literal wording to ensure that the meaning is accurately conveyed. (Everyone would agree that the antecedent to “he” is Zedekiah, who is named at the beginning of v. 18, even though the masculine name that immediately precedes the pronoun is Zedekiah’s maternal grandfather, Jeremiah.)

Is each approach appropriate? Is each permissible? Is one preferable to the other?

My answer is that each translation is simply following its own basic philosophy. The literal translations render the passage with a word-for-word correspondence. The dynamic translations render it with an expansion of the wording to ensure that the meaning is accurately conveyed.

If you use both styles of translation, you get the best of both worlds.

Ray observes, “I found it interesting how many of these highlights focus on trusting God and not worrying.”  Commenter Thomas points out, “users of NLT and ESV appear to highlight several different passages, while users of all the other translations concentrate exclusively on just a very few verses.”

The top highlighted verses were all highlighted in multiple translations, but one set of verses, Romans 8:38-39, was highlighted (relatively) often in the NLT, but not often in any of the other six. Why do you think these verses might have been so much more popular in the NLT than in the other translations?

Romans 8:38-39, NLT: (I’ve linked to Biblos here because of their useful parallel verses feature)

And I am convinced that nothing can ever separate us from God’s love. Neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons*, neither our fears for today nor our worries about tomorrow–not even the powers of hell can separate us from God’s love. No power in the sky above or in the earth below–indeed, nothing in all creation will ever be able to separate us from the love of God that is revealed in Christ Jesus our Lord.

* Greek nor rulers.

With the New Living Translation, the Bible was divided into sixths, with a scholar appointed general editor over each large chunk. Then individuals books of the Bible (or small collections of books) were parceled out to three experts (I worked on Matthew), who compiled long lists of suggestions for revising Ken Taylor’s original
Living Bible Paraphrased. We ranked these in terms of priority, sent them to the general editor over our part of the Bible, who synthesized a selection of them, interacted with a Tyndale House stylist, and sent a draft back to us for us to repeat the process. Eventually the full translation emerged.

Dr. Blomberg is describing the process for creating the 1996 edition of the NLT text. The 2004 second edition was another stage in the development of the NLT, and I suspect other members of our blog team who were actually involved in those events (I didn’t come on until 2005, and I am not a participant in Bible Translation Committee discussions) might write a thing or two about that on this blog in the future. But I am getting off topic.

It may be surprising for some to read that Dr. Blomberg has been involved in translation work for the NLT, HCSB, ESV, and now serves on the committee responsible for the TNIV. In fact, he is one of several excellent scholars who have participated in multiple translation projects. Just comparing the list of the ESV’s Translation Oversight Committee with the full list of the NLT Translation team reveals 25% overlap (three of the 12 ESV committee members participated in the NLT: Paul House, Robert Mounce, and Gordon Wenham). Expanding to the list of ESV translation reviewers would reveal significantly more overlap between the two teams. Similar overlaps can be observed between the NLT team and the NIV/TNIV Committee for Bible Translation (Blomberg, Douglas Moo, Larry Walker).

These scholars believe it is important to produce translations that are true to the original Greek and Hebrew, and meaningful for those who read it. They work very hard to ensure that God’s Word is faithfully communicated in English. And they do this for each translation they contribute to, whether it be the “essentially literal” ESV, the “optimal equivalence” HCSB, the “balanced” TNIV, or the “dynamically equivalent” NLT.

In this vein, I would also like to point to another comment Blomberg makes later in the post:

More than ever, I have an intense appreciation of how much easier it is to
criticize a translation than it is to produce one that will be both as clear as
possible and as accurate as possible.

That is unequivocally true. There will always be facets of the original text that are captured better by one translation or another, and it is easy to point out where the NLT (or TNIV, or ESV, etc.) has “missed” something. Instead, why don’t we celebrate the wonderful work that these scholars do and appreciate the fact that we have multiple excellent, peer-reviewed Bible translations in English?

Thanks for your work on Bible translation, Dr. Blomberg. Thanks to all of the scholars that have dedicated their life to helping everyone understand God’s Word more clearly.

I love the NLT. It is one of my primary translations at home and at church, but this wasn’t always the case.

The first Bible I ever used with any regularity was an NIV. The small Christian school that I attended in first through fourth grade allowed us to memorize Scripture from either the NIV or the KJV, and I went with the NIV since it was the pew Bible at my church. When I was in high school and began to get “serious” about Bible study, I made the switch over to the NASB. I also used other translations, including the NIV, NKJV, and KJV. In the church circles I was running in, literal was best. And it didn’t get more literal than the NASB.

I got a lot of mileage out of the NASB, and in fact I still have the leatherbound, ultrathin reference edition that my future wife gave me for my birthday in 1998, all marked up from my first couple of years in Bible college.

I don’t remember when I first learned about the NLT, but I do remember when my wife discovered it. She was in a study group, reading through the entire Old Testament for a survey class in our first semester at Moody Bible Institute. One of her friends had an NLT, and the group quickly decided to simply pass the NLT around rather than having everyone read from their own translation. She took note and made sure that her next Bible purchase would be an NLT. Despite her enthusiasm, I still wasn’t convinced, and I stayed with the NASB. This was in the fall of 1998, and she has been an NLT gal ever since.

The first time I actually used the NLT for more than checking a verse occasionally was in the spring of 2001, when my wife and I led an evangelistic Bible study through the Gospel of John. Everyone in our college ministry was able to invite their friends to come and read through John together, one chapter each week, to discover Jesus for themselves. We chose the NLT as our group text, and the church generously provided a complete copy of the NLT for everyone that attended the study. It was a fun, and fruitful, experience.

While we were leading this group through John, I was also flexing my new–and still somewhat awkward–Greek skills by translating through myself, along with the NLT, NASB, NIV, and D.A. Carson’s commentary. I certainly didn’t agree with the NLT everywhere, but often I found that I agreed with the NLT over against another translation in a particular reading. By the end of the 21-week session, I was quite pleased with the NLT. I still didn’t switch to it as my primary Bible translation, but I had very positive feelings about it. In fact, we used it again for a new group the next year.

Through my study of Greek, I spent a lot of time in class and on my own thinking and reading about translation and language. More and more, I became disillusioned with the way I used to read a “literal” translation, under the impression that I had virtually unfettered access to the Greek and Hebrew original. As a result, I was “converted,” and became a very strong advocate of dynamic equivalency. I returned “home” to the NIV, looking forward to the publication of the TNIV.

At this point, I went through a stage in my journey where I was harshly critical of more formal translations. I took every opportunity to criticize the “poor English” of the NASB. I was vocally critical of the “essentially literal” argument surrounding the (then) new ESV. This was a time when my voice was changing, and I probably should have kept my mouth shut.

In retrospect, I realize that the problem was with the way I had understood the NASB, not the translation itself. I was overconfident in the ability of any English translation to give me a transparent view of the original text, right down to words and grammar. I took my erroneous assumptions about how to use such a translation and compounded the error by blaming the translation itself.

I was just getting settled with using the TNIV when I became aware of an open position on the Bible editorial team here at Tyndale House Publishers. My wife had been using the NLT as her primary Bible (and therefore my secondary Bible) for several years, and so I was excited by the opportunity. I came in for my interview and was surprised to learn that the NLT had received a facelift. In 2004, a second edition had been released, of which my wife and I were completely unaware. We had been reading the 1996 edition. I left that interview with a copy of the new edition and burgeoning interest in the NLT.

I went home that afternoon and spent several hours poring over the NLT second edition: comparing specific passages with the 1996 edition (and my TNIV), reading Galatians straight through, checking individual verses against the Greek and Hebrew, noticing that poetry was now set as poetry, etc. I was impressed. It seemed like every verse had been gone over with a fine-toothed comb and improved where necessary. Whether I got the job or not, I became an “NLT guy” on that day.

The picture on this post is of my Bible shelf at work, and you can probably identify several of the Bibles I mentioned thoughout the post. I carry an NLT and my Reader’s Greek NT to church with me on most Sundays (so they’re not in the picture), but I also make regular use of the NRSV, I listen the the TNIV on my iPod, and I read the KJV in my pocket edition of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. So even if I am an NLT guy, I’m not an NLT-Only guy.

What’s your story?
Post your story in the comments. Or, if you have a blog, write up a post about it and give us a link in the comments.

The history of the NLT is one reason for the confusion, but another is related to other common misconceptions about Bible translation itself, specifically the philosophy known as dynamic equivalence. In the simplest terms possible, dynamic equivalence is a philosophy of translation that intends to communicate the meaning of the Bible, as it would have been understood in its original setting, as accurately as possible in today’s language. This is often discussed in contrast with another philosophy of translation, formal correspondence or essentially literal. Again, simply, formal correspondence intends to communicate the words and word order of the original as closely as possible in the modern language. Of course, every translation of the Bible is more complex than those definitions imply. A strict formal correspondence translation would be unintelligible in any language, and a dynamic equivalent translation could become overly concerned with the limitations of its intended audience.

The juxtaposition of these two complementary translation philosophies, often with an eye to which of the two is “superior,” often feeds some misconceptions about one philosophy or the other. This can happen from either side of the debate. In a recent post at Tim Challies’ blog, some misconceptions about dynamic equivalence are presented, and I’d like to address them here.

The main idea of Challies’ post is that words are of the utmost importance in any communication. At a basic level, that is certainly true. He begins his post with a few examples to illustrate the importance we often place on knowing and studying the exact words and not simply the message of important documents such as ransom notes, court transcripts, and love letters. Very true, but in all of the examples he cites, translation is not in view. If the kidnappers had written the ransom note in French, I’m sure any parent would insist on getting a fluent French speaker to translate the letter for them in language that made sense. And courts use on-the-fly interpreters to translate witness testimony into English for jurors. So, there isn’t one-to-one correspondence between the emotional examples Challies begins with and the conclusions he makes about Bible translations.

But what about words in translation? First, it is important to understand that there is almost never a one-to-one correspondence between any word in one language and a word in another language (especially when one of the languages is ancient). To point to one example used in the post, machaira is a Greek word that refers to “a relatively short sword or other sharp instrument, sword, dagger” (BDAG), along with related metaphorical meanings. It is unlikely that any English reader, when given the word “sword,” would conjure up the mental image of a 5-inch dagger. So the English word and the Greek word are similar–certainly related–but not equivalent.

So Challies’ concern that the English word “sword” isn’t present in the NLT and other dynamic equivalent translations isn’t quite the problem he makes it out to be. To translate a metaphor in the original with an English phrase that captures its meaning, as the NLT does in Romans 13:4, is not “making a mockery of the words that were breathed out by God,” as Challies characterized it. Rather, it is a transparent attempt to clearly communicate the force of the language to English readers today. When Paul wrote Romans, representatives of the government literally phorei machairan (“carried a sword”). This is no longer the case, at least not in most English-speaking areas of the world. It is appropriate to explain the metaphor in this context. In Acts 12:2, the word machaira is not being used metaphorically. James was probably literally killed with a sword. This doesn’t display an inconsistency in the NLT translation philosophy; rather, it displays a deep commitment to communicate the meaning of Scripture as clearly as possible.

In Psalm 32:1, Challies compares the NLT to the ESV and wonders, “what has become of the word ‘covered’? . . . Is ‘covered’ not one of the words God breathed out and wrote in His book?” Again, the assumption that an English word is inspired is suspect. The word in Hebrew is kesuh, and “put out of sight” is just as legitimate a translation as “covered.”

More could be said about these issues, but I would like to close by pointing out some of the implicit and explicit claims about the value of dynamic equivalent translations of the Scriptures in Challies’ post. Here is a sampling of his words: