The King James Version was made by about fifty scholars in six companies, working to a list of fifteen rules (see The King James Version). Modern translations are made in much the same way, by committees working to written principles, but with more stages, more reviewers, more technology and a publisher waiting at the end.

This article describes how that process usually works, drawing on the published accounts of several major translations: the New International Version, the English Standard Version, the New Living Translation and the Christian Standard Bible. Each organises the work differently, and the details below are examples, not a single recipe.

Who starts a translation?

A complete Bible translation takes years and costs a great deal. Someone has to decide it is needed and pay for it. Usually three parties are involved, sometimes combined in one organisation.

  • A sponsor owns the project and, usually, the copyright. For the NIV this is Biblica, formerly the New York Bible Society, later the International Bible Society. For the New American Standard Bible it is the Lockman Foundation; for the New Revised Standard Version, the National Council of Churches; for the New Living Translation, the Tyndale House Foundation.
  • A publisher sells the printed editions and licenses the text. Zondervan publishes the NIV in the United States and Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom; Crossway, a not-for-profit publisher, both owns and publishes the ESV; Holman Bible Publishers, part of the Southern Baptist Convention’s publishing arm Lifeway, publishes the CSB.
  • A translation committee makes the decisions about the text.

The relationship between the last two matters. A committee that answers to a publisher can be pressed to make a translation sell; a committee that controls its own text can resist. The NIV’s makers addressed this by making the Committee on Bible Translation (CBT) self-governing: it was formed in 1965, after a meeting of evangelical scholars at Palos Heights, Illinois, and it alone decides what the NIV says. The publishers and the sponsor do not vote on the text.

The founding documents

Before any verse is drafted, a translation needs to agree what it is trying to do. Most publish a statement of principles, often in their preface or in a separate document. These typically cover:

  • The base text. Which editions of the Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, and how freely to depart from them. Almost all modern Protestant and Catholic translations use the Masoretic text in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia or its successor for the Old Testament, and a recent Nestle-Aland or United Bible Societies edition for the New. The New King James Version is the main exception, keeping the Received Text.
  • The approach. Where the translation stands between form and meaning (see Word for word or meaning for meaning?). The ESV’s preface calls it “essentially literal”; the CSB describes its method as “optimal equivalence”; the NLT aims at the clarity of a thought-for-thought translation; the NIV describes a balance between transparency to the original and natural English.
  • The audience. Who will read it, at what reading level, and whether it is meant for public reading, private study or both.
  • Policies on contested matters. How to render the divine name, whether to use gender-inclusive language for people, how to mark disputed passages, and whether to capitalise pronouns referring to God.

The Lockman Foundation’s statement is unusually compact. It calls its goals a “Fourfold Aim”: that its translations be true to the original languages, grammatically correct, understandable, and give Jesus Christ his proper place. Others run to many pages. Either way, the document becomes the measure against which later drafts are argued.

Drafting

Few modern committees translate from scratch. Many start from an existing text: the ESV from the 1971 Revised Standard Version (see The RSV and the ESV), the NKJV from the King James Version, the CSB from the Holman Christian Standard Bible, the NLT from the Living Bible. Even a “new” translation like the NIV began with drafts prepared book by book.

The usual pattern is to divide the Bible among specialists. The NLT’s published account describes it clearly. About ninety scholars took part. Each book was assigned to three scholars with expertise in it, who each reviewed a base text and proposed revisions. Their suggestions went to a senior translator responsible for that section of the Bible, who combined them into a first draft. That draft then went to the Bible Translation Committee, which reviewed and approved every verse. The New Testament scholar Craig Blomberg, one of the reviewers, has described the same process from inside, including the role of a Tyndale House stylist working with the general editor.

The original NIV followed a similar plan, with initial translation teams for each book followed by intermediate and general editorial committees, and finally the CBT. In the ESV’s case a fourteen-member Translation Oversight Committee made the final decisions, supported by some fifty Translation Review Scholars and an Advisory Council of about the same size.

Stylists and readers

A draft can be accurate and still read badly. Most committees therefore include people whose job is the English: literary stylists, editors and sometimes poets. They look at rhythm, clarity and how a passage sounds when read aloud. The King James translators did the same, reading drafts aloud to one another, and modern committees still treat public reading as a test.

The audience also has to be checked. A Bible for readers of English as a second language, or for children, needs controlled vocabulary and sentence length. The New International Reader’s Version (NIrV), a simplified edition of the NIV, was designed for young and new readers. Even translations for general adults pay attention to readability. The makers of the Common English Bible (2011) sent their drafts to dozens of reading groups of non-specialists from a range of denominations, who read every verse aloud and flagged sentences that were hard to follow.

Language data is now part of the process. For its 2011 revision, the CBT commissioned a study with the makers of the Collins dictionaries, using a very large database of modern English, to see how English speakers actually used words such as “man” and “he” for people in general. The committee used the results in its decisions on gender language, and published its reasoning.

Review and voting

Once a draft exists, it is reviewed, usually more than once. Typical stages are:

1. Specialist review. Scholars check each book against the Hebrew or Greek and write comments. 2. Committee discussion. The committee goes through the text, often verse by verse, and votes. The CBT, for example, does not change the NIV by simple majority: a change needs a large supermajority of the committee. 3. Outside reading. Pastors, teachers and lay readers comment on drafts, especially on clarity. 4. Copy-editing and proofreading. Footnotes, cross-references, headings, punctuation and spelling are checked against each other, and the text is set in type, which raises its own questions about line breaks, poetry layout and how notes are numbered.

The voting is where the founding documents earn their keep. When two scholars disagree, the argument is not only about the Greek but about which rendering fits the translation’s stated aims.

Publication

A modern translation is often released in stages. Many have published the New Testament first, sometimes with the Psalms and Proverbs, and the complete Bible a few years later: the NIV New Testament appeared in 1973 and the whole Bible in 1978; the NKJV New Testament in 1979 and the whole in 1982. Early release allows the committee to gather responses before the text is fixed.

Publication also brings licensing. Most modern translations are copyrighted, and the sponsor or publisher sets the terms on which they can be quoted, printed by other publishers, or included in apps and websites. Royalties from those licences often fund the translation’s upkeep. This model, and its critics, are the subject of Why Bible translations are copyrighted.

Why translations keep changing

Few major translations stay unchanged for long. The NIV was revised in 1984 and again in 2011. The NLT appeared in 1996, received a thorough second edition in 2004 and smaller updates since. The ESV of 2001 was revised in 2007, 2011, 2016 and 2025. The CSB of 2017 was updated in 2020, when, among other things, the committee changed its rendering in Romans 3:25 to “mercy seat.” The NASB, first completed in 1971, was updated in 1977, 1995 and 2020.

There are several reasons for this.

  • New editions of the original texts. The Nestle-Aland Greek New Testament reached its 28th edition in 2012, and the Biblia Hebraica Quinta is appearing book by book. Each edition makes some changes to the text.
  • New knowledge. Studies of ancient languages, inscriptions and the Dead Sea Scrolls keep refining what particular words meant.
  • Changing English. Words drift in meaning and connotation. A rendering that was natural in 1970 can be misleading or comic fifty years later.
  • Readers’ responses. Committees receive comments from pastors, scholars and readers, and the best of them lead to changes.
  • Debate. Some revisions respond to controversy, as when the ESV’s 2016 rendering of Genesis 3:16 was reversed in 2025 after criticism.

Revision has a cost. Readers who memorise verses, churches that print liturgies and publishers that produce study Bibles and commentaries all prefer a stable text. Crossway’s short-lived announcement in 2016 that the ESV text would be fixed permanently, reversed within weeks, showed how hard it is to balance these interests. Most sponsors now aim for small, periodic updates rather than either frequent change or none.

A process designed to be checked

The common thread is accountability. A modern committee translation spreads decisions across many people, writes down its principles, and passes every verse through several stages of review, so that no single person’s preferences decide what the Bible says. Its weakness is that the reasoning behind each decision usually stays inside the committee. Readers see the result and perhaps a footnote, not the arguments.

Open Word Bible tries to work in the open instead. It translates directly from the SBL Greek New Testament and the Westminster Leningrad Codex; its drafts are AI-assisted (see AI-assisted translation and human review); and it publishes, for each sentence, a reasoning record of the decisions made and the options considered (see Showing the work). Nothing is marked as reviewed until a named human reviewer has approved it. It uses other translations only for comparison, and it is released under CC0, so it carries no licence fees at all.

Sources

  • Barker, Kenneth L., ed. The Making of a Contemporary Translation: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986.
  • “Preface.” The Holy Bible, New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978.
  • Committee on Bible Translation. “Updating the New International Version of the Bible: Notes from the Committee on Bible Translation.” Biblica, 2010.
  • Biblica. “Committee on Bible Translation.” Official NIV website.
  • Tyndale House Publishers. “Introduction to the New Living Translation” and “Translation Process.” Official NLT website.
  • Crossway. “Preface.” The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. Wheaton: Crossway, 2001.
  • Lockman Foundation. “Who We Are” and “History.” Official website.
  • Scorgie, Glen G., Mark L. Strauss, and Steven M. Voth, eds. The Challenge of Bible Translation: Communicating God’s Word to the World. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.
  • This article quotes no full Bible verses; where it quotes a few words from a copyrighted translation or preface, the source is named. Other Bible quotations on this site are from the World English Bible (public domain).