The identification of his relative must be the same as the phrase used in verse 1. It is very awkward in many languages to keep referring to a person without some proper name, but there is no alternative in the present discourse.
The statement of Boaz is literally in Hebrew: “Naomi, who has come back from the country of Moab, is selling the parcel of land which belonged to our kinsman Elimelech.” Good News Translation restructures these principal clauses into a cause-effect or reason-result relation, indicating that in view of the fact that Naomi has come back from Moab, she wanted to sell the field. One of the difficulties in translating this sentence is that this information is entirely new. There is no suggestion, for example, that Boaz had talked to Naomi about this subject. It may be that Boaz simply introduced the question of the land in order to pose this as the first problem or aspect of the negotiation. Such a procedure would certainly be a clever one. This is the opinion of Rowley, op. cit., pages 94-95.
In some languages it is important to indicate that the nearest relative would no doubt know about the field, and therefore the verse may be restructured as “then he said to the nearest relative, ‘You will remember the field that belonged to our relative Elimelech. Naomi has now returned from the country of Moab and she wants to sell it’ ” (cf. New English Bible).
The field that belonged to our relative Elimelech may be translated as “the field which our deceased relative Elimelech formerly owned.”
Our relative Elimelech may be rendered as “Elimelech who was a member of our family,” “Elimelech who belonged to our clan,” “Elimelech who was related to us,” or “Elimelech who was one of our kin.”
The Hebrew verb translated wants to sell is normally read as a participle “is selling.” So H. Greßmann, Die Schriften des Alten Testaments, Göttingen, 1910-1915, I, 2, page 275; Haller, page 16; Herzberg, page 277; Century Bible and the majority of modern translations. The form of the perfect tense (which is the form occurring in the Hebrew text) would normally be translated as “she had sold the field.” This would seem to imply that the land had already been sold and that it would need to be bought back from the actual owner. But in verse 9 Boaz buys the land directly from Naomi. It is not necessary, however, to understand the perfect tense in Hebrew as expressing some past event; it can indicate the fact that a decision to sell and the actual act of selling take place at the same time. See Brockelmann, Hebräische Syntax, par. 41. An additional argument is that this use of the perfect is found in other legal procedures, e.g., in Genesis 23.11. Early translators certainly read a perfect, though they did not rightly understand the meaning: Septuagint hē dedotai; Syriac “Naomi has sold to me.” An appropriate translation in such a case would be “she wants to sell.”
Quoted with permission from de Waard, Jan and Nida, Eugene A. A Handbook on Ruth. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 1978, 1992. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .