New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Study Edition), “Appendix A1: Principles of Bible Translation”
“A reliable translation must: Sanctify God’s name by restoring it to its rightful place in the Scriptures. . . . Accurately convey the original message that was inspired by God. . . . Translate expressions literally when the wording and structure of the target language allow for such renderings of the original-language text. . . . Communicate the correct sense of a word or a phrase when a literal rendering would distort or obscure the meaning. . . . Use natural, easy-to-understand language that encourages reading.”
The appendix sets out the translation philosophy the organisation says governed the New World Translation. It argues that a strict word-for-word rendering can mislead (giving “poor in spirit”, “to the spirit boiling” and the Hebrew word for “hand” as examples), that free paraphrase can distort, and that “doctrinal bias can easily color a translator’s work”. It also states that “Quite a number of Bible translators have taken the unjustifiable liberty of omitting God’s name, Jehovah, from modern translations even though that name is found in ancient Bible manuscripts,” and quotes the 1950 foreword: “We offer no paraphrase of the Scriptures. Our endeavor all through has been to give as literal a translation as possible, where the modern English idiom allows and where a literal rendition does not for any clumsiness hide the thought.”
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Provenance and verification note for New World Translation of the Holy Scriptures (Study Edition), Appendix A1: Principles of Bible Translation
Confidence note. The full appendix was fetched from JW.org and read in its entirety on 19 September 2026; the quoted wording was confirmed character by character against the page text. The page is undated; the year recorded is that of the revision whose appendix this is, as stated in Appendix A2 on the same site.
Corroborated by. src-nwto-w-2015-1215-living-principles, src-nwto-faq-nwt-accurate
Notes. The same three arguments (reliability, faithfulness, literalness) appear in condensed form in the JW.org FAQ page recorded separately.
Accessed. 19 September 2026 · Source ID. src-nwto-nwtsty-a1-principles