Could you give me your assesment of the NIV as a translation?

The current version of the NIV is a solid translation. In 1997, the central translation committee and Zondervan Publishing House, in a combined statement, declared that the NIV would not be tampered with. They were acting under pressure from the broohaha that Susan Olasky's article in World magazine had created. However, a revision of the NIV that is not called a revision is in the works. It will no doubt attempt to accommodate the shifts in the English language toward gender neutrality, but will for the most part, I'm sure, not make strong concessions to egalitarian ideology. There are simply too many strong complementarians on the translation committee to allow that to happen.

However, there are also strong egalitarian voices, Gordon Fee being chief among them. The NIV has had a good run. It is still a good translation, and the next iteration will continue to be decent. However, from a linguistic perspective there were flaws in the translation philosophy from the beginning. In particular, the chopping up of long Greek sentences in the NT destroyed much of the intricately argued subordination of thought. The NIV thus overtly became a simpler Bible than previous semi-literal translations had been, and with this simplicity it gave up too much. This is particularly true in the NT; hardly so in the OT.