Exegesis:

exēlthen ‘he went out,’ i.e. of the house and town (cf. Swete).

palin ‘again’: probably refers back to 1.16, although Lagrange thinks the reference is to 1.45.

thalassa ‘sea’ is the Lake of Galilee (cf. 1.16).

pas ho ochlos ‘all the crowd’: not the same ‘crowd,’ of course, referred to in 2.4 (for the same expression pas ho ochlos ‘the whole crowd,’ ‘all the people’ cf. 4.1b, 9.15).

ērcheto … kai edidasken ‘came … and he taught’: the imperfect tense of the verbs portrays repeated acts of coming, on the part of groups of people, and of teaching, on the part of Jesus.

ērcheto pros auton ‘was coming to him’: Revised Standard Version “gathered about him” is not quite consistent with the translation of the phrase elsewhere (cf. 1.45 “came to him” and 2.3 “came, bringing to him”), but is not out of keeping in this context.

autous ‘them’: that is, the people who composed ho ochlos ‘the crowd.’

Translation:

It may be necessary to introduce ‘Jesus’ as the subject of this verse, since the immediately preceding third person singular reference is the paralytic who was healed.

One must be consistent in the translating of sea which in most instances will be the equivalent of ‘lake’ (see 1.16).

One must make certain that the translation of all the crowd does not refer to the crowd of 2.4, for although undoubtedly some of the same people were in attendance on the two occasions, this is not the same group of people. It is better to translate ‘all the people.’

It is most important that a word for teach is not such as to imply merely class-room instruction, something which not infrequently happens in translations, since translation helpers assume that the educational processes introduced in mission schools are the only legitimate form of teaching. (We ourselves are often deceived in somewhat the same way, not realizing that the classroom technique, though useful for mass production methods is highly inefficient in essential communication.) One should employ either a descriptive term of common usage, e.g. ‘to give to be learned’ (Tzeltal), or some well-known figurative phrase which will be fully meaningful, e.g. ‘to engrave the mind’ (Ngäbere) and ‘to cause others to imitate’ (Huichol).

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 .