A week or so ago, I quoted from M. James Penton's "Apocalypse Delayed: The Story of Jehovah's Witnesses." A number of you commented on it, so I thought I'd do it again. Here he comments on the worst features of the New World Translation.
"Far more serious than the outwardly Arian and anti-traditional nature of this Watch Tower version are: 1) its biased translation of certain texts to buttress specific Witness practices or secondary doctrines... For example, while the word 'homologeo' is frequently translated 'confess' in various passages of the Christian Greek Scriptures, at Romans 10:10 it is rendered 'publicly declare.' Now 'publicly declare' is a perfectly acceptable translation: many lexicons give it. But when one of Jehovah's Witnesses reads the text--'For with the heart one exercises faith for righteousness, but with the mouth one makes public declaration for salvation'--he does not think, ordinarily at least, of a simple confession of faith at baptism. Rather, the Watch Tower Society encourages him to believe that he must carry on a house-to-house preaching work."
I recall how the Society always condemned other Bible translators for not inserting the article "a" at John 1:1, while they sometimes did in other passages--to support the Trinity doctrine. Here they stand condemned of precisely the same sort of inconsistency--to convince JWs of the need to spend their time promoting the religion.