The Greek that is translated as “eye of a needle” in English (and in many Romance and Germanic languages) is rendered variously in different languages:
“loop of the needle” (Tae’) (source: Reiling / Swellengrebel)
In Warlpiri, needles were not traditionally used, so after much discussion the translation there is “(Does a camel go into) the hole of an ant’s nest?” which uses a more traditional metaphor. (Source: Sam Freney in this article.)
The Greek and Latin that is translated as “resurrection” in English is translated in Chicahuaxtla Triqui and Pohnpeian as “live-up” (i.e. return to life) (source: Reiling / Swellengrebel) and in Iloko as panagungar: a term that stems “from the word ‘agungar,’ an agricultural term used to describe the coming back to life of a plant which was wilting but which has been watered by the farmer, or of a bulb which was apparently dead but grows again.” (Source: G. Henry Waterman in The Bible Translator 1960, p. 24ff. )
In Estado de México Otomi, it is translated as “people will be raised from the dead,” in Teutila Cuicatec as “the dead having to come to life again,” in San Mateo del Mar Huave as “arose from the grave” (source: Viola Waterhouse in Notes on Translation August 1966, p. 86ff.), and in Kriol as gidap laibala brom dedbala or “get up alive from the dead” (source: Sam Freney in this article .)
In the Pitjantjatjara translation, the Hebrew that is translated as “desolate wilderness” or “desert waste” in English was translated with “totally destroyed.”
Translation consultant Sam Freney (in this article) explains: “I noticed they captured the lush ‘before’ picture like the garden of Eden, but they didn’t talk about the aftermath as a ‘desert.’ Instead, they said it was ‘totally destroyed.’ When I asked the team about this, it turned out that there’s not really a good word for ‘desert’ they could use here. I found this fascinating –- after all, Pitjantjatjara is a ‘Western Desert Language’, and traditional Pitjantjatjara lands are in the central Australian desert around and to the south of Uluru.
“But this is a case where trying to come up with an ‘accurate’ term for the word ‘desert’ would result in a less accurate translation. For a start, there’s no obvious word to choose so it’s going to end up sounding at least a bit unnatural. But the communicative effect of choosing a word that reflects the kind of land the Pitjantjatjara people live in would knock the impact of this verse down a whole lot. You can imagine the response: ‘Before, the land was beautiful and very green, but after this enormous destructive army came through it was just like the landscape where we’ve lived for thousands of years.’”
Apali: “God’s one with talk from the head” (“basically God’s messenger since head refers to any leader’s talk”) (source: Martha Wade)
Michoacán Nahuatl: “clean helper of God” (source: B. Moore / G. Turner in Notes on Translation 1967, p. 1ff.)
Nyongar: Hdjin-djin-kwabba or “spirit good” (source: Warda-Kwabba Luke-Ang)
Wè Northern (Wɛɛ): Kea ‘a “sooa or “the Lord’s soldier” (also: “God’s soldier” or “his soldier”) (source: Drew Maust)
Iwaidja: “a man sent with a message” (Sam Freney explains the genesis of this term [in this article): “For example, in Darwin last year, as we were working on a new translation of Luke 2:6–12 in Iwaidja, a Northern Territory language, the translators had written ‘angel’ as ‘a man with eagle wings’. Even before getting to the question of whether this was an accurate term (or one that imported some other information in), the word for ‘eagle’ started getting discussed. One of the translators had her teenage granddaughter with her, and this word didn’t mean anything to her at all. She’d never heard of it, as it was an archaic term that younger people didn’t use anymore. They ended up changing the translation of ‘angel’ to something like ‘a man sent with a message’, which is both more accurate and clear.”)