Translating word for word as far as English allows, keeping the form and structure of the original. Examples: NASB, ESV, NKJV.

Its strength is that it lets a reader see the shape of the original: repeated words stay repeated, and connecting words like "for" and "therefore" survive. Its weakness is that it can be stiff, and sometimes a literal rendering hides the meaning an original reader would have caught at once.

Translating thought for thought, aiming for the same meaning and effect in natural English. Examples: NLT, GNT, CEV.

Its strength is clarity: it reads the way people talk. Its weakness is that the translators have resolved ambiguities for you, so where the original could mean two things you only see one of them.

Most formal: NASB, ESV, NKJV, KJV. Middle: CSB, NIV, NET. More functional: NLT, GNT, CEV. Paraphrase: The Message.

The placings are approximate, and publishers revise their editions. What matters is knowing roughly where the translation in your hands sits, so you know what kind of decisions have already been made for you.

A paraphrase restates the text freely in contemporary idiom, often with more explanation and colour than the original has. It is usually the work of one person rather than a committee.

A paraphrase can be vivid and useful for reading large sections quickly. It is a poor base for careful study, because it is the furthest from the wording you are trying to observe.

It compares the thousands of surviving manuscripts to work out the original wording, because none of the original documents themselves survive.

The number of manuscripts is an advantage, not a problem: copying mistakes in one tradition can be caught by another. The great majority of differences are spelling and word order, and no central belief of the faith rests on a disputed reading.

The KJV was translated from a Greek text based on relatively late manuscripts. Older manuscripts found since do not contain some of those verses, so modern translations mark them as later additions.

Nobody removed anything from the Bible. Scribes occasionally added a clarifying phrase, and that phrase was copied forward. The added words about the Father, the Word, and the Spirit in 1 John 5:7-8 are the best-known example.

1 John 5:7-8

Use a reliable, committee-produced translation that you will actually read, and for serious study, compare several — including at least one toward the formal end.

Where good translations agree, you can be confident about the meaning. Where they differ, you have found exactly the place that deserves a closer look, and often a word study.

Hebrew for most of the Old Testament, Aramaic for a few sections, and Greek for the New Testament.

The Aramaic sections are parts of Ezra and Daniel and a single verse in Jeremiah, reflecting the language of the Babylonian and Persian empires. The New Testament was written in the everyday Greek of the Roman world, not a special religious dialect.

Jeremiah 10:11

A Greek translation of the Old Testament made in the centuries before Christ. The New Testament writers often quote it rather than the Hebrew.

That is why an Old Testament quotation in the New Testament sometimes reads differently from the same verse in your English Old Testament, which is translated from the Hebrew. The difference is usually not the New Testament writer changing the text, but him quoting the Bible his readers knew.

They gave us Hebrew manuscripts about a thousand years older than the oldest complete copies we had before, and showed how carefully the text had been copied.

The Isaiah scroll found at Qumran is close in wording to the medieval manuscripts that English Old Testaments had been translated from. Where it differs, it helps translators, and modern translations make use of those readings.

Because English keeps changing, older manuscripts keep being found, and scholars keep learning more about the ancient languages.

A word that was clear in 1611 or 1970 may mean something different now. A revision is not a sign that the earlier translation was careless; it is the ordinary work of keeping a faithful translation readable.

Because when Paul addressed a whole church with that word, he usually meant the men and the women in it, and the translators want English readers to hear what the first readers heard.

Christians disagree about how far this kind of rendering should go, and the disagreement is about accuracy on both sides. Knowing that a translation has made this choice, and comparing it with a more formal one, lets you see both the wording and the meaning.