Category: dynamic equivalence

by Dr. Daniel Block, NLT Bible Translation Committee and Gunther H. Knoedler Professor Emeritus of Old Testament, College I will never forget the meeting at the airport hotel in the late 1980s. With the encouragement and blessing of Kenneth Taylor ’38, Litt.D. ’65, I and five other biblical scholars were there to discuss a revision […]

Translating the biblical texts into English (or any other language) is not as simple as it may sound. For starters, the translator has to determine which philosophy of translation to follow. The two basic options are formal equivalence (also called word-for-word, literal, or essentially literal) and dynamic equivalence (also called thought-for-thought). And there is also […]

We find the story of the widow’s mite in Mark 12:41-44 and Luke 21:1-4. In both passages (which are nearly identical), Jesus makes the point that the widow’s gift to the Temple treasury was very costly to her, because it represented everything she had. But the challenge for the translator is to determine how best […]

By Mark D. Taylor The issue of sentence structure in English Bibles is interesting. On the surface, one might assume that an English Bible could/should simply follow the structure of the sentences in Hebrew and Greek. But the very concept of a “sentence” differs from language to language. Let’s look at the prologue to Romans […]

Mark D. Taylor As a dynamic-equivalence translation, the NLT translates the Hebrew and Greek text in natural, understandable English. This means that we try to avoid technical terms that the average reader would not understand. Two such technical terms not used in the NLT are “propitiation” and “expiation.” The Bible Translation Committee chose not to […]