In 2016, Tyndale House Publishers, the Conference of Catholic Bishops of India Commission for Bible, ATC Publishers Bengaluru, and twelve Biblical scholars collaborated to prepare a New Living Translation Catholic Edition. Other revisions were released in 20 with minor changes throughout. A revision in 2007 comprised mostly minor textual or footnote changes. Soon after that, a new revision was begun and The Second Edition of the NLT (also called the NLTse) was released in 2004. NLV is still used to identify the New Living Translation in ONIX for Books. Advanced reader copies of the book of Romans were originally printed as the New Living Version, but eventually renamed the New Living Translation to avoid confusion between this new work and The Living Bible. Work on this revision began in 1989 with ninety translators it was published in July 1996, 25 years after the publication of The Living Bible. The New Testament translation was based on the two standard editions of the Greek New Testament (the UBS 4th revised edition and the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece 27th edition).
The Old Testament translation was based on the Masoretic Text ( Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia) and was further compared to other sources such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, Septuagint, Greek manuscripts, Samaritan Pentateuch, Syriac Peshitta, and Latin Vulgate.
It has been suggested that this "thought-for-thought" methodology, while making the translation easier to understand, is less accurate than a literal (formal equivalence) method, and thus the New Living Translation may not be suitable for those wishing to undertake detailed study of the Bible. A part of the reasoning behind adapting the language for accessibility is the premise that more people will hear the Bible read aloud in a church service than are likely to read it or study it on their own. The method combined an attempt to translate the original texts simply and literally with a dynamic equivalence synergy approach used to convey the thoughts behind the text where a literal translation may have been difficult to understand or even misleading to modern readers. The New Living Translation used translators from a variety of Christian denominations.