The Watchtower (public edition), “How Can You Choose a Good Bible Translation?”
“The translation committee judged that to render the best sense of these words according to the context was more important than to produce a strictly literal translation.”
The article classifies translations as interlinear, paraphrase or balanced, and places the New World Translation in the third category. It states that “the New World Translation uses nearly 16,000 English expressions to translate some 5,500 Biblical Greek terms, and it uses over 27,000 English expressions to translate about 8,500 Hebrew terms”, and warns that free translations “either insert their opinion of what the original text could mean or omit some of the information contained in the original text”.
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Provenance and verification note for The Watchtower (public edition), How Can You Choose a Good Bible Translation?
Confidence note. Opened on the Watchtower Online Library on 19 September 2026; the issue was confirmed by locating the article in the Online Library listing for The Watchtower (public edition) of 1 May 2008, and page numbers taken from the document’s page markers.
Corroborated by. src-nwto-nwtsty-a1-principles
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-nwto-w-2008-0501-choose-translation