Good News Translation indicates a shift in speakers at the beginning of this verse: “The people said.”

Raise a wailing over us is more naturally expressed in Good News Translation as “sing a funeral song for us.” The noun wailing was previously used in verse 10.

In the remainder of this verse, our eyes is parallel with our eyelids while run down with tears is parallel with gush with water. In some languages it may be more effective to substitute a single image, as in Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch “that our eyes may overflow with tears.” Others, however, will retain the parallelism, as Good News Translation has.

Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on Jeremiah. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2003. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .