Refuse to utter any lie: Good News Translation “Don’t tell lies at all” will be hard to improve on. Notice that Good News Translation makes one paragraph of verses 12-13. This is good.

For the habit of lying serves no good: Contemporary English Version has a helpful model here with “No good ever comes from telling lies.”

Quoted with permission from Bullard, Roger A. and Hatton, Howard A. A Handbook on Sirach. (UBS Helps for Translators). New York: UBS, 2008. For this and other handbooks for translators see here.