In the Hebrew text Joab drops his dagger (or: sword) in verse 8 and then uses it to stab Amasa in verse 10 without any mention that he picked it up again. In languages like Kaqchikel it is “necessary to mention that at some point he picked it up. This does seem to affect the element of surprise, but still in languages like Kaqchikel Joab cannot stab Amasa until he picks up his dagger.”
hole / cave
The Hebrew that is translated in English as “He came to a cave (…) and went in to relieve himself. It happened to be the very cave in which David and his men were hiding far back in the cave.” or similar was problematic to translate in Kaqchikel “because the words for ‘cave’ and ‘hole’ are the same in Kaqchikel. So if you are not careful you can wind up with Saul relieving himself in a hole with David at the bottom. In Kaqchikel this was resolved by means of the directional apo (‘onward’) as opposed to ka (‘downward’) (Y rija’ xok k’a apo chiri’ richin . . .) which implies he kept walking more or less on a level plain.”
narrative order (1Sam 18:12)
The Hebrew that is translated as “Saul was afraid of David because the Lord was with David but had abandoned him” or similar in English had to be restructured in San Blas Kuna that follows a subject-verb-object order (Hebrew uses verb-subject-object or subject-verb-object and English uses subject-verb-object) “to have cause and effect. They put first that Saul realized that God no longer helped him but he did help David. So he became afraid of David.”
narrative order (Ruth 3:14)
The Hebrew that is typically translated in English as “So she lay there at his feet, but she got up before it was light enough for her to be seen, because Boaz did not want anyone to know that she had been there.” needed to be reordered in languages like Bribri and Poqomchi’ “to reverse the order of the cause and effect, putting the cause first: ‘Boaz didn’t want anybody to know that Ruth had slept there. Because of that, Ruth got up very early the next morning (to go).’
The exact wording in Poqomchi’: Re’ Booz ma’ xraaj taj chi xkinab’eej chi re’ ixoq re’ re’ xponik woroq ar, ruum aj re’, re’ Rut ko q’equm wach ak’al xwuktik chi junwaar.
bitter, Mara
The Hebrew name Mara means “bitter” which is here used as a designator for the state Naomi finds herself in (translated in English: “call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt bitterly with me.” or similar). “However not all languages use the word for ‘bitter’ to describe things like lives, or feelings. In Poqomchi’ we had to translate this as ‘sadness,’ because ‘bitter’ would have meant nothing in this context, and the proposed name change would have been as meaningless as if left unexplained.”
fox
The Greek and Hebrew that is translated as “foxes” in English is translated in Mam as “weasel.” Ron Ross explains: “Foxes is often a difficult concept to express in this part of the world. The Mayas don’t seem to know them. In the Mam project we finally put ‘weasel’ rather than ‘coyote,’ which were basically our choices.”
In Toraja-Sa’dan it is translated as sindallung or “civet cat.” H. van der Veen (in The Bible Translator 1950, p. 21 ff. ) explains: “This animal is a real chicken thief, and is a type of cat with a head resembling that of a fox.”
In Noongar, it is translated as mokiny or “dingo” (in Luke 9:58) (source: Warda-Kwabba Luke-Ang).
See also fox (Herod).
insects that fly, swarming insects
The Hebrew that is translated as “insects that fly” or “swarming insects” in English is translated as “small animals with wings like flies” in Mam, “insects that fly in big groups” in Chuj, and “animals that fly and have more than two legs” in Kaqchikel. None of these languages has a pre-existing category for insects.
See also birds of the air / fish of the sea.
female first person singular pronoun in Psalms
In Garifuna the first person singular pronoun (“I” in English) has two forms. One is used in women’s speech and one in men’s speech. In the Garifuna Bible the form used in men’s speech (au) is typically used, except when it’s clear that a woman’s speech is quoted (for instance in John 4:9) or in Psalms where the women on the translation team insisted that the form used in women’s speech (nuguya) would be used throughout the whole book.
Ronald Ross (in Omanson 2001, p. 375f.) tells the story: “Throughout most of the translation, [the distinctions between the different forms of the pronouns] presented no problem. Whenever the speaker in the text was perceived as a man, the male speech forms were used; and when a woman was speaking, the female speech forms were used. True, the women members of the translation team did object on occasion to the use of the male forms when the author (and narrator) of a book was unknown and the men translators had used the male speech forms as the default. Serious discord arose, however, during the translation of the Psalms because of their highly devotional nature and because throughout the book the psalmist is addressing God. The male translators had, predictably, used the male form to address God, and the male form to refer to the psalmist, even though women speakers of Garifuna never use those forms to address anyone. The women contended that they could not as women read the Psalms meaningfully if God and the psalmist were always addressed as if the readers were men. The men, of course, turned the argument around, claiming that neither could they read the Psalms comfortably if the reader was assumed to be a woman.
“Initially there seemed to be no way out of this impasse. However a solution was found in the ongoing evolution of the language. There is a strong propensity for male speech and female speech to merge in favor of the latter, so the few remaining male forms are gradually dying out. Moreover, male children learn female speech from their mothers and only shift to the male speech forms when they reach adolescence to avoid sounding effeminate. However they use the female form buguya when addressing their parents throughout life. So the women wielded two arguments: First, the general development of the language favored the increasing use of the female forms. Secondly, the female forms are less strange to the men than the male forms are to the women, because the men habitually use them during early childhood and continue to use them to address their parents even in adulthood. Therefore, the female pronominal forms prevailed and were adopted throughout the book of Psalms, though the male forms remained the default forms in the rest of the translation.”