Robert Alter's latest translation of the Pentateuch into English, The Five Books of Moses, provides much of interest. I found his earlier book, The Art of Biblical Narrative, which examines the Bible with a strong literary and narrative eye, to be extremely illuminating, and greatly enlarged my perception of the Bible.

But his latest translation is not without problems. One example is his rendering of Exodus 21:22. He gives this as:

Exo 21:22 And should men brawl and collide with a pregnant woman and her fetus come out but there be no other mishap…

The problem is with the word other, which does not directly occur within the original Hebrew, and has been added in so as to point the reader strongly towards a particular interpretation: that the mishap occurs to the pregnant woman, and not to the fetus.

But many other translators and commentators have noticed that the original passage is not nearly so specific, and allows the interpretation that the mishap refers to damage occurring to the fetus. Alter's note to the passage says:

"Other" is supplied in the translation for the sake of clarity.

Unless all the other commentators are wrong, Alter has added a word in so as to make it say what he thinks he should say. Putting aside any issue about what the passage intended to refer to (and my opinion is that it is clearly the fetus), a translator ought to either indicate clearly that there is a controversy here (and it is clearly a highly significant controversy) or, much better, translate the passage in English that is also not totally clear, so that the reader must puzzle through the text.