Translation Philosophy
Holman Bible Publishers assembled an international, interdenominational team of 100 scholars and proofreaders, all of whom were committed to biblical inerrancy. The translation committee sought to strike a balance between the two prevailing philosophies of Bible translation: formal equivalence (literal, "word-for-word", etc.) and dynamic or functional equivalence ("thought-for-thought"). The translators called this balance "optimal equivalence."
According to the translators, the primary goal of an optimal equivalence translation is "to convey a sense of the original text with as much clarity as possible". To that end, the ancient source texts were exhaustively scrutinized at every level (word, phrase, clause, sentence, discourse) to determine its original meaning and intention. Afterwards, using the best language tools available, the semantic and linguistic equivalents were translated into as readable a text as possible.
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