Craig Blomberg has an insightful post for anyone who has ever wondered about how a committee Bible translation works. Dr. Blomberg was part of the team that worked on the New Living Translation in the 1990s. Here is what he says about his work on the Gospel of Matthew:

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.

Labels: dynamic equivalence, essentially literal, ESV, HCSB, Keith Williams, NLT, TNIV, translation

One of the most common misconceptions about the NLT is that it is a paraphrase. It is not. The NLT is, in fact, a translation from Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic; it represents the work of nearly 100 scholars, specialists in the book(s) of Scripture to which they contributed.

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:

Labels: bible, dynamic equivalence, essentially literal, Keith Williams, NLT, translation, words