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New Translation

By Joe Felim

Following the success of The Living Bible (40 million copies sold over 30 years), a decision for revision was made that began in 1989 with ninety translators. The New Living Translation was completed and published seven years later in 1996. Soon after the publication of the first edition, the NLT Bible Translation Committee began a further review and revision of the translation. Their goal was “to increase the level of precision without sacrificing the text’s easy-to-understand quality.” The Second Edition of the NLT (also called the NLTse) was released in 2004. It reflects a translation style that is slightly less dynamic than the first edition in many places, yet it still retains natural contemporary English. The second edition also brought a poetic format to many passages, especially that of the prophetic writing in the Old Testament.

This translation follows a combination of formal equivalence (or word-for-word) and dynamic equivalence (or thought-for-thought) methods of translation. The translators set out to render the meaning and style of the original texts in clear, contemporary English. The words and phrases are translated as simply and literally as possible. If the literal approach resulted in a translation that was hard to understand or was misleading, a more dynamic approach was used. Metaphors are translated literally if the natural meaning is communicated clearly in English. But metaphors and other figures of speech are rendered more dynamically if necessary to ensure clear transmission of the original meaning. From the NLT introduction: “The translators’ goal was to be both faithful to the ancient texts and eminently readable. The result is a translation that is both exegetically accurate and idiomatically powerful.”

Another minor revision was completed in 2007 with minor textual and footnote changes.

First and second edition text may be identified by looking at the dates on the copyright page or simply by reference to the NLT logo. A square logo indicates a first edition (1996) text, while a diamond logo indicates a second edition (2004 or 2007) text.

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The New Living Translation

By Joe Felim

One afternoon I was in my room, studying the Bible in preparation for leading the weekly student meeting that evening. I found myself baffled about the meaning of a chapter in Ephesians, on which I had been asked to speak. I read the chapter several times, without much comprehension. Then I read it slowly, a verse at a time, with no betterthe teaching or make any useful application to my life or the lives of the students. results. I could understand the words, of course, but I just could not understand the significance of

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with the realization that my Bible reading in the New Testament letters had ever been thus. All my life I had wrestled in vain to understand them. Others could grasp the meaning; why couldn’t I? Was I more stupid than my friends who gloried in reading the Word? Frustrated and ashamed, I exclaimed to the empty room, “Why can’t somebody translate the Bible so a person like me can understand it?” (p. 96)

That same yearning found another expression fifteen years later when Ken’s ten children had the same trouble understanding the King James Version that he had always had.

Ken and Margaret Taylor had family devotions each evening after supper, but when Ken asked the children a few questions to make sure they had understood the day’s Bible reading, he was often met with blank stares. So Ken would restate the meaning of the passage in simpler terms. In his autobiography he describes a poignant moment that brought back his own frustrations: “I remember that after I had explained the meaning of one particular verse from the King James Version, Janet, then about eight, said, ‘But Daddy, if that’s what it means, why doesn’t it say so?’”

One Saturday morning, Ken was puzzling over how to communicate the meaning of that evening’s Scripture passage to his children. He decided to write out a simpler version of the passage in advance. It worked, and from time to time he used that method of paraphrasing the Scripture passage for the family. Eventually he decided to paraphrase the entire book of Romans, followed by the other epistles of the New Testament.

Ken thought other families might also find his paraphrase helpful, so he sent the manuscript to several publishers. They all turned him down, but he was undaunted, so he decided to publish it himself. He called the book Living Letters and arranged for 2,000 copies to be printed. He named his tiny company Tyndale House Publishers in honor of William Tyndale, the sixteenth-century translator who translated the Bible into English and was burned at the stake for his efforts.

Living Letters was published in 1962, and within a few years it was followed by a series of books containing other portions of Scripture paraphrased into modern English. By the time the complete edition, The Living Bible, was published in 1971, the paraphrase had become phenomenally popular. Over the next twenty-five years, more than 40 million copies of The Living Bible were sold in dozens of different formats. Despite its popularity, however, Ken Taylor and his colleagues at Tyndale House were frustrated that it never received wide acclaim by pastors and scholars. Too often it was dismissed as being “just a paraphrase.”

In the summer of 1986, Mark Taylor, president of Tyndale House, and Ron Beers, the senior editor of the Life Application Bible (and later Editor-in-Chief at Tyndale House), were discussing ways in which The Living Bible might be made more acceptable to pastors. They concluded that pastors’ perspectives on various translations are established during their seminary years, so Mark and Ron asked themselves how The Living Bible could be made more acceptable to seminary professors. This line of reasoning led to the conclusion that a group of seminary professors should be invited to assist in revising The Living Bible. If The Living Bible were revised by an independent group of scholars, it would be easier to convince other seminary professors to see it as a bone fide translation.

In the early stages, the revision task was seen as simply correcting any words, phrases, or verses where The Living Bible’s exegesis (interpretation) was judged to be faulty. As the project unfolded, however, the translation team came to see that they were creating a new translation from the Hebrew and Greek (rather than simply a revised paraphrase) that followed the dynamic equivalence theory of translation. The goal of this translation theory is to produce in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent of the message expressed by the original-language text-both in meaning and in style. Such a translation attempts to have the same impact on modern readers as the original had on its own audience.

A dynamic-equivalence translation can also be called a thought-for-thought translation, as contrasted with a formal-equivalence or word-for-word translation. Of course, to translate the thought of the original language requires that the text be interpreted accurately and then be rendered in understandable idiom. So the goal of any thought-for-thought translation is to be both reliable and eminently readable. Thus, as a thought-for-thought translation, the New Living Translation seeks to be both exegetically accurate and idiomatically powerful.

In making a thought-for-thought translation, the translators must do their best to enter into the thought patterns of the ancient authors and to present the same ideas, connotations, and effects in the receptor language. In order to guard against personal biases and to ensure the accuracy of the message, a thought-for-thought translation should be created by a group of scholars who employ the best exegetical tools and who also understand the receptor language very well. With these concerns in mind, the Bible Translation Committee assigned each book of the Bible to the three team scholars. Each scholar made a thorough review of the assigned book and submitted suggested revisions to the appropriate general reviewer. The general reviewer reviewed and summarized these suggestions and then proposed a first-draft revision of the text. This draft served as the basis for several additional phases of exegetical and stylistic committee review. Then the Bible Translation Committee jointly reviewed and approved every verse in the final translation.

As a result of this intensive team process, the final translation is precise in its rendering of the meaning of the original and is even more readable than its predecessor, The Living Bible. Tyndale House and the Bible Translation Committee decided to call the translation the “Holy Bible, New Living Translation” to show that this translation is built on the heritage of The Living Bible but is also a translation in its own right.

The translation work was finally completed in 1995, and five different editions were typeset and released in 1996: the Deluxe Text Edition, the TouchPoint Bible edition, the New Believer’s Bible, The One Year Bible, and the Life Application Study Bible. Other editions followed in subsequent years, including the Large-Print and Giant-Print Editions, the Reference Edition, the Student’s Life Application Bible, The Daily Walk Bible, The Praise and Worship Study Bible, The Daily Study Bible for Men, and The Daily Study Bible for Women.

In the first ten years of publication more than 14 million copies of the New Living Translation have been sold.

When the NLT was first published in 1996, the Bible Translation Committee said, “This translation is so good, it’s a shame not to make it even better.” So Tyndale House encouraged the outside scholars to undertake a review of the entire text. The challenge was to raise the level of precision of translation without losing the dynamic qualities that were already making the NLT very popular. An example of improved precision is that the poetic passages of the Old Testament were recast into a poetic format rather than using the prose format of the original NLT translation. The entire revision process took six years, and the second-edition text of the NLT was launched in 2004. Over a period of several years Tyndale House will be replacing all first-edition formats with the second-edition text.

Through the publication of The Living Bible and then the New Living Translation, Ken Taylor’s dream has been realized: “Someone has finally translated the Bible so a person like me can understand it”!

new-living-translation-bible-study

New Living Translation

By Joe Felim

This translation follows a combination of formal equivalence (or word-for-word) and dynamic equivalence (or thought-for-thought) methods of translation. The translators set out to render the meaning and style of the original texts in clear, contemporary English. The words and phrases are translated as simply and literally as possible. If the literal approach resulted in a translation that was hard to understand or was misleading, a more dynamic approach was used. Metaphors are translated literally if the natural meaning is communicated clearly in English. But metaphors and other figures of speech are rendered more dynamically if necessary to ensure clear transmission of the original meaning. From the NLT introduction: “The translators’ goal was to be both faithful to the ancient texts and eminently readable. The result is a translation that is both exegetically accurate and idiomatically powerful.”

Following the success of The Living Bible (40 million copies sold over 30 years), a decision for revision was made that began in 1989 with ninety translators. The New Living Translation was completed and published seven years later in 1996. Soon after the publication of the first edition, the NLT Bible Translation Committee began a further review and revision of the translation. Their goal was “to increase the level of precision without sacrificing the text’s easy-to-understand quality.” The Second Edition of the NLT (also called the NLTse) was released in 2004. It reflects a translation style that is slightly less dynamic than the first edition in many places, yet it still retains natural contemporary English. The second edition also brought a poetic format to many passages, especially that of the prophetic writing in the Old Testament.

Another minor revision was completed in 2007 with minor textual and footnote changes.

First and second edition text may be identified by looking at the dates on the copyright page or simply by reference to the NLT logo. A square logo indicates a first edition (1996) text, while a diamond logo indicates a second edition (2004 or 2007) text.