Exegesis:

anablepsas eis ton ouranon (cf. 6.41) ‘looking up to heaven’: in an attitude of prayer.

estenaxen (only here in Mark) ‘he sighed,’ ‘he groaned’: an expression of deep emotion. Lagrange takes it to be a prayer quickly uttered.

ephphatha (only here in the N.T.) is the Greek transliteration of the Aramaic ’ethpatah the causative of phathah ‘open,’ Preserving the Aramaic word, the evangelist gives its Greek equivalent for the benefit of his readers.

dianoigō (only here in Mark; cf. anoigō next verse) ‘open,’ ‘open thoroughly.’

Translation:

Looking up to heaven may need to be rendered as ‘looking up toward heaven,’ ‘to’ would imply ‘into’ or ‘seeing heaven itself.’

Ephphatha must be transliterated, but all such resulting forms must be carefully checked to see to it that they do not have meaning in the indigenous language. For example, in Tzeltal the closest equivalent transliteration (based on Spanish, as the national language of the area) would be epata, meaning ‘you have found a great deal,’ a meaning which obviously could not be adjusted to the following explanation. Accordingly, the transliteration was changed slightly to epjata (in which the j represents a degree of aspiration), which has no meaning. As a basic principle, therefore, we can say that transliterations should reflect the closest possible correspondence with the source language, except where the resultant forms in the receptor language have meanings of their own.

Be opened is a kind of passive command, a form which is not found in some languages. Moreover, it is presumably relatable to the ears, but is addressed to the man. The closest equivalent in some languages is ‘your ears will be open’ or ‘open up, ears.’

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 .