The New Living Translation provides a unique balance of accuracy precision, readability, and a rich emotive quality. It is presented in an easy-to-understand heart language that will touch you personally, almost as if the Bible were written just for you. The careful work of 90 leading Bible scholars and stylists ensures that the New Living Translation is an accurate, precise, and authoritative representation of the original Hebrew and Greek texts

The New Living Translation — ideally suited for serious study, devotional reading, memorization, and reading aloud. Enjoy and understand God's Word — from His heart to yours.

The translators of the New Living Translation set out to render the message of the original texts of Scripture into clear, contemporary English. As they did so, they kept the concerns of both formal-equivalence and dynamic-equivalence in mind.

Formal-Equivalence

On the one hand, they translated as simply and literally as possible when that approach yielded an accurate, clear, and natural English text. Many words and phrases were rendered literally and consistently into English, preserving essential literary and rhetorical devices, ancient metaphors, and word choices that give structure to the text and provide echoes of meaning from one passage to the next.

Dynamic-Equivalence

On the other hand, the NLT translators rendered the message more dynamically when the literal rendering was hard to understand, was misleading, or yielded archaic or foreign wording. They clarified difficult metaphors and terms to aid in the reader's understanding. The translators first struggled with the meaning of the words and phrases in the ancient context; then they rendered the message into clear, natural English. Their 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.

2nd Edition Improvements

• Various portions of the Old Testament (especially the Prophets) previously set in prose format have now been set in poetic format to reflect the poetic nature of the Hebrew text.
• Various passages throughout the text were fine-tuned with regard to precision of translation.
• Many marginal notes were added to help the reader study manuscript differences and to show the relationship between a literal translation and the rendering in the NLT. For example, the phrase "they beat their breasts" (Luke 23:48) in ancient times meant that people were expressing deep sorrow. Thus, the NLT translates the expression dynamically: "They went home in deep sorrow." A footnote shows a literal rendering of the Greek as follows: "Greek went home beating their breasts."
• The translation of difficult terms is made more concise. In the NLT, difficult terms are often made easier to understand by expanding them into longer phrases. The second edition often shortens these expansions — without sacrificing clarity.
• Literary character is preserved. The original Bible text often repeats words or phrases for literary effect. Where these repetitions don't add additional meaning, the original NLT often condensed them. The NLT second edition restores many of the repetitions to show the English reader the literary flavor of the original text.
• Wording is more consistent. In the NLT second edition, a particular Hebrew or Greek word is more consistently translated with the same English word where the word has the same meaning — making the entire translation more consistent for serious study.