Exegesis:

kraxas kai polla sparaxas ‘crying out and convulsing (him) much’: though masculine, the two participles refer to the unclean spirit (cf. v. 20).

krazō (cf. 3.11) ‘cry out,’ ‘shriek.’

sparassō (cf. 1.26) ‘convulse.’

polla is adverbial ‘much,’ here it indicates number, or frequency, ‘many times’ (cf. Moule ‘fit after fit’; some translations have ‘convulsion after convulsion’).

nekros (12.26, 27; cf. 6.14) ‘dead’; here, ‘a corpse,’ ‘a dead body.’

hostē … legein ‘so as to say,’ ‘so that they said’: indicates result (for this construction cf. 1.27).

tous pollous ‘the many’: most translations take it to mean ‘most (of them),’ ‘many (of them)’; Arndt & Gingrich take it to mean ‘all of them’ (cf. 6.2).

hoti is recitative, introducing direct speech.

apethanen (cf. 5.35) ‘he died,’ ‘he is dead.’

Translation:

For convulsing see 1.26.

Like a corpse is translatable in Southern Subanen as ‘looked like a dead body,’ but in other languages the use of the equivalent of corpse is questionable. Hence, a somewhat different idiom may be required, e.g. ‘seemed to remain dead’ (Tzeltal).

Most of them should be related here to the people in general, e.g. ‘most of the people there.’

He is dead must in some languages be translated as ‘he has died,’ for death is regarded as a process, or event, and not a state, as is implied in a verb such as is.

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 .