I once called Raymond Franz to ask him a couple of questions. I regret that at the time of the call I dumped on him my suspicion that he was a bittered and negative apostate who just had to find a way to justify writing his two books.
Ray kept his composure, but I could tell he was hurt by my insinuations, his tone of voice changed and he paused for a moment. When he spoke again, he sounded like he was crying inside. Not once, did he lash back at me.
That was some 25 years ago. Looking back, I was so sorry for unleashing my frustration at him. Since then, I realize I was wrong on so many counts. I had no right to judge him. Now that he is gone, I regret not calling him back to apologize for my indiscretion. More than ever!
Anyways, he told me in answer to one of my questions, that Fred Franz was the main translator of both the NWT and the Kingdom Interlinear. He was personally bothered by critics who presented a case out of proportions around Fred’s reluctance to attempt to translate Gen. 1.4 from English to Hebrew. Ray told me that Fred was not comfortable with the way the attorney was presenting his case against the WT Society, and chose not to engage in his ruse.
Anyways, the NWT/Kingdom Interlinear itself is proof that whoever worked on the translations had the intellectual capacity to deal with the translation difficulties. And in many places they did not follow standard translation choices.
One such example is the beginning clause of 1 John 5.19, which says in most versions: "We know that we are of God." (NASB) This clause, however, does not sound like a normal English statement a mother would use with her daughter, for instance. This is because the NASB translators rendered the Greek with English equivalents. They did not take into account how a modern English speaker would translate the Greek of John which reads literally: "We have known that out of the God we are." Most English versions read as the NASB does. A few read like so, "We know that we are children of God." This may be better, but is sort of a paraphrase, because the word "children" is not in the Greek text, though implied. But I think the best renderings come from the Twentieth Century Translation and the NWT.
TCT: "We realize that we come from God..."
NWT: We know we originate with God...
These two translations acknowledge the presence of the preposition "ek [out of]" which implies ‘action proceeding from a source,’ in this case, Christians proceeding from God (spiritually born from God, as children of God) as the source of all life and spirit.