Translation Issues

The Wall Street Journal strikes again! This time, it is a fascinating article about the battle over Bible translations in the Zondervan company. Bought out by HarperCollins recently, Zondervan is the publisher of the wildly popular (45% market share) New International Version (NIV) of the Bible. Not content to dominate the evangelical market, Zondervan has annonuced plans to publish the Today's NIV (TNIV) in 2005. The TNIV is a gender-inclusive translltion, targeted at the more liberla-minded of denominations. The interesting thing to watch is if the NIV suffers among its constituencies as a result of the TNIV coming out from the same publisher. This move seems to make perfect business sense, but that assumes that conservatives will understand the business sense that HC and Zondervan are using.