Your elders and your judges: see 5.23 and 1.16. The possessive your refers to the people of Israel as a whole.

Come forth: translators need to pay attention to the point of view; what this means is that the elders and judges are to “go out” (Good News Translation) to the place where the body was discovered. In certain languages it will be necessary to state where they go or come out from. It is evident that the passage means that they would come from all the nearby towns. So we may translate “Your leaders and judges must go out [or, come out] from the nearby towns and measure….”

Measure the distance: the purpose of this is to determine which is the closest town to the dead body. Instead of Revised Standard Version cities it is better to say “towns” (Good News Translation, Contemporary English Version; also New Revised Standard Version). It is assumed here that the early Hebrews did have practical means for measuring long distances such as this. However, the term used by a translator should be a general one and not refer to a measuring stick or tape that would be employed today. If a general term cannot be found, we may say something like “estimate” or “find out,” and measure the distance may be expressed as “estimate the distance from the place where the body was found to each of the nearby towns.”

Which are around him that is slain: this is a literal rendering of the Hebrew text. New Revised Standard Version has “the towns that are near the body”; more natural translations in English are New International Version “the neighboring towns” or New Jerusalem Bible “the surrounding towns.”

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Deuteronomy. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2000. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .