But as for you …: The Hebrew here puts emphasis on the adults in the Israelite community, contrasting them with their children. Good News Translation fails to convey this emphasis. Chewa keeps it by saying “But the rest of you here….”

Your dead bodies shall fall in this wilderness: The same expression is used in verse 29 (see the comments there), but the word order in Hebrew is reversed, perhaps to suggest the certainty of what the LORD predicts here. Good News Translation renders the gruesome picture here simply as “You will die here in this wilderness,” which is a flat translation. A better model is “you will drop dead in this wilderness” (New Living Translation) or at least “you will perish in this desert.” Many African languages will have an ideophone to express this imagery in an emphatically visual manner.

Quoted with permission from de Regt, Lénart J. and Wendland, Ernst R. A Handbook on Numbers. (UBS Helps for Translators). Miami: UBS, 2016. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .