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. On the one hand, they translated as simply and literally as possible when that approach yielded an accurate, clear, and natural English text.

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