Arise, go down quickly from here: Moses had been lying down on his face (in a prone position), not doing a thing during the forty days. An alternative model is “Get up and hurry down the mountain.”

Your people whom you have brought out of Egypt: here Yahweh is saying that Moses is responsible for the people. The sense of your people is that Moses was their leader, he was in charge of them.

Have acted corruptly: this accuses the people of committing a terrible sin, that is, building a metal idol in the shape of a calf. See the comment at 4.16.

Turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: the Israelites had quickly disobeyed God and acted contrary to his commands. Other ways to express this are “they have already disobeyed what I commanded them” or “they have already stopped obeying me.” But we may also keep the figurative language; for example, “They have quickly left the path that I commanded them to walk on.”

A molten image: in most languages the phrase “metal image” will be the one to use. To indicate that it was made by the process of smelting metal ore and shaping the metal into the figure of a calf may be difficult; “cast metal” is the normal phrase in English (New International Version “a cast idol”).

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 .