Exegesis:
pollous tōn huiōn Israēl ‘many of the descendants of Israel.’
huios ‘son’ here in the plural meaning ‘descendants.’ Hence many translators have ‘Israelites’ (e.g. Translator’s New Testament, New English Bible).
epistrepsei epi kurion ton theon autōn ‘will he turn to the Lord their God.’
epistrephō ‘to turn,’ ‘to return’; here in the sense of ‘to bring back.’ In the Septuagint the verb serves as a translation for several forms of Hebrew shuv when denoting religious or moral conversion. Hence some translators have “he will convert” (Brouwer, Nieuwe Vertaling, Rengstorf), but (1) ‘to turn’ keeps the metaphor of the Hebrew word better and (2) epistrephō is not a technical term for the description of some inner experience which may be associated with religious conversion.
kurios ho theos autōn ‘the Lord their God’ usually in Old Testament quotations (cf. 4.8, 12), but here and 1.32, 68 in passages strongly reminiscent of the Old Testament. The term is, therefore, to be understood from the Old Testament background as the Greek rendering of Yahweh ʾElohim in which Yahweh is a proper name and ʾElohim a class noun.
Translation:
Turn … to. More or less literal renderings are ‘turn them round again to’ (Santali); or, ‘turn their lives towards’ (Sranan Tongo), ‘turn-back the minds of the Israelites in order to go-in-the-direction-of’ (Balinese), the words ‘life’ and ‘mind’ respectively serving to signal the metaphorical use of the verb; or again, ‘bring forward (i.e. to the place someone has left)’ and ‘lead cause them turn (and) return come seek’—closest natural equivalents in Ekari and Thai, respectively. Possible other renderings are, ‘cause to follow anew,’ ‘cause to believe’ (Shipibo-Conibo), ‘cause to seek/obey again.’
The sons of Israel, or, ‘the people of Israel,’ ‘the Israelites.’
The Lord their God. Their God. In some languages the word for ‘God’ cannot be, or usually is not, grammatically possessed; in others the possessive pronoun conveys the wrong meaning, e.g., ‘the God whom they have/possess/rule’ instead of ‘the God who rules/helps/guides them’; hence shifts to, ‘he that is God to them,’ ‘the One they acknowledge/obey as God.’ ‘the God whom they worship’ (Apache). Yet another pronominal problem is found in Shipibo-Conibo, where the pronoun ‘our’ means ‘your, their, and mine too,’ but the pronouns ‘their’ and ‘your’ imply ‘not mine’; to translate ‘their God,’ would imply that he is not the God of the angel speaking, nor the God of Zechariah. Hence the pronoun ‘our’ had to be used.
Quoted with permission from Reiling, J. and Swellengrebel, J.L. A Handbook on the Gospel of Luke. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1971. For this and other handbooks for translators see here . Make sure to also consult the Handbook on the Gospel of Mark for parallel or similar verses.