Exegesis:

katekeito (2.4, 15; 14.3) ‘she was lying down,’ ‘she lay sick.’ Moulton & Milligan give examples from the papyri with the meaning ‘to be ill’ and Field translates “kept her bed, being sick of a fever.”

puressousa (only here in Mark) ‘feverish,’ ‘(with) a fever.’ The present participle is in the nominative case modifying penthera ‘mother-in-law,’ and has a causative force: “Simon’s mother-in-law, because she had a fever, was in bed….” Lagrange and Taylor point out that the participle itself does not necessarily mean that a prolonged siege of the fever is implied; all it says is that when Jesus and the others entered the house, she was in bed, sick.

legousin ‘they tell’: with considerable probability Turner classifies this as an impersonal plural, meaning simply ‘he (Jesus) was told’; Mark does not mean that Simon and Andrew with James and John told him. Taylor, however, is of the opinion that the companions of Simon are meant (cf. Swete and Lagrange).

Translation:

The Revised Standard Version now is purely transitional, not temporal.

Simon’s mother-in-law may be rendered ‘the mother of Simon’s wife,’ unless there are more idiomatic or specific terms for designating such a relationship.

To have a fever seems to us as English speakers to be a perfectly legitimate way of talking about a fever, but in other languages fevers may ‘have people.’ There are, in fact, a number of different ways in which one may speak of this type of illness, e.g. ‘heat was hers’ (Southern Bobo Madaré), ‘thrown down by a fever’ (Tzeltal), ‘making a fever’ (Shipibo-Conibo), or ‘taken by God with fever’ (Shilluk, in which all illness is spoken of as ‘being taken by God,’ an idiom which cannot be avoided in the Scriptures).

The Greek text implies two elements in ‘lay sick’ one that the mother-in-law was in bed and the second that she was sick with a fever. Both of these circumstances must be specifically indicated.

If a language distinguishes case, gender, and number (as in most Indo-European languages), it is quite easy to translate the clause they told him of her by the use of three pronouns. However, in Huautla Mazatec there are no such distinctions indicated in the verb construction and as a result there can be as many as 32 ambiguities unless nouns are used to distinguish clearly who speaks to whom about what. In fact, if the ‘him’ and ‘her’ are ambiguous, this clause is almost inevitably misunderstood, for it would be more natural for the people to tell the woman about Jesus than the reverse. In many languages, therefore, it is necessary to employ nouns rather than pronouns to identify the participants, e.g. ‘the people there told Jesus about the woman.’ In some languages, however, a phrase ‘about the woman’ does not fit the context, because of the specific nature of the information and so the clause must be changed to read ‘told Jesus that she was sick’ (Central Tarahumara).

Quoted with permission from Bratcher, Robert G. and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on the Gospel of Mark. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1961. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .