Strong men will strip them of their gold and silver and of the robes they wear: Strong men is a justifiable translation, but the Greek simply says “those who are able.” Compare New Revised Standard Version “Anyone who can” This is better than Strong men. Good News Translation has gone a step further: “Anyone who can” and does “take off the silver…” is by definition a thief and robber, referring back to “thieves and robbers” in verse 57. Therefore the phrase is adequately rendered by the relative pronoun “who.”
Strip them of their gold and silver means “remove [or, strip off] their gold and silver.”
Go off with this booty: The thieves take away (carry off) the gold, silver, and clothing of the idols. Go off with is as much as the Greek text says, though it is appropriate to use some verb suitable to describe what robbers do. “Walk away with” (Good News Translation) does this in English, as does “make off with” (New Jerusalem Bible, New English Bible). “Walk away with” does not mean that the thieves walk away from the temple as opposed to running. It is simply an English idiom meaning that the theft is committed easily and with impunity.
The New American Bible translation for this verse needs an explanation. It reads “those who seize them strip off the gold and the silver, and go away with the clothing that was on them….” This has the robbers taking off the gold and silver, but going away with the clothing (also New English Bible, Traduction œcuménique de la Bible). Technically, this is correct. It is the only way the Greek sentence here can be understood. Literally it reads “… silvered things and gilded things, of which those who are strong [or, able] will strip the gold and the silver, and they will go off in possession of the clothing wrapped around them.” This rendering is really not literal enough, however, because in Greek there is the sequence “the gold and the silver and the clothing,” but the “and” before “the clothing” grammatically does not connect with “the silver”; it begins another statement. But the robbers will have to remove the clothing before they can go off with it, and they are surely not going to strip the images of their gold and silver and not go off with that as well. So the restructuring found in Revised Standard Version, Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version and most versions is preferable.
Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on The Shorter Books of the Deuterocanon. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2006. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.