Exegesis:
eis tas akanthas ‘among the thorns’: in clearing the ground for planting, the roots of these thorns and weeds had not been removed, and in time they sprang up and choked the tender plants (cf. Rawlinson).
akanthai (4.8) ‘thorns,’ ‘thistles,’ ‘weeds.’
eis ‘among.’
anebēsan (cf. 1.10) ‘came up’: here as a synonym of exanatellō (v. 5) ‘spring up,’ ‘sprout.’
kai sunepnixan auto ‘and they choked it,’ i.e. the plant sprouting from the seed which had been sown, not (clearly) the seed itself in the ground.
sumpnigō (4.19) ‘crowd together,’ ‘choke off.’
karpon ouk edōken ‘it yielded no fruit’: referring to grain, “yielded no grain” (Goodspeed, Revised Standard Version), “bore no crop” (cf. Translator’s New Testament).
karpos (4.8, 29; 11.14; 12.2) ‘fruit.’
Translation:
Other seed (which is collective) may be rendered as ‘other seeds’ or ‘other grains.’ In Highland Oaxaca Chontal one may say ‘two and three seeds,’ for this is the idiomatic way of saying ‘some.’ In Tzeltal the equivalent expression is ‘another hand-full of seeds.’
These seeds did not actually fall among thorns, in the sense of growing plants, but where thorns had been growing or where there were roots of thorn plants, for note that the effect upon the seed is not seen until the “thorns grew up.” In some languages, therefore, one may translate ‘where thorn plants had been’ or ‘where thorn-plant roots were.’
Choked is a good idiom in English and Greek, but not acceptable in many languages. In Kekchí one must say, ‘the thorns grew up and made a shadow’ (thus preventing the growth of the grain). In Tzeltal one may say ‘the plants made it to stop growing’; in Central Tarahumara and Southern Subanen ‘made them unable to grow’; in San Mateo del Mar Huave ‘shaded them under’; in Tabasco Chontal ‘took them under’; in Toraja-Sa’dan and Javanese ‘they held it under’ and in Pamona ‘they overshadowed it.’
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 .