In Greek the pronoun I is in emphatic position. This is why Good News Translation has “I, too.”
For I am a man under authority, with soldiers under me reflects the compact style of the Greek. It is possible, as some scholars suggest, that the terseness of the officer’s reply derives from his military background. For most readers of English it may be better to fill in the “blanks” with the words that are presupposed though not expressly stated. Compare Good News Translation, for example, where several words are included that are not found in the Greek text:
• I, too, am a man under [the] authority [of superior officers], [and I] have soldiers under me.
To express the idea of being under the authority of superior officers, translators can say “I have leaders who can order me” or “I, too, have people who are bigger (or, more important) than I and who can tell me what I have to do.”
To have soldiers under me can then be “and there are soldiers who have to obey my orders” or “there are soldiers who do what I command.”
There are languages that will find the direct speech Go and Come very natural, but in other cases it will prove better to use indirect speech, as in “I tell one soldier to go, and he goes, and I say to another that he should come, and he comes. In the same way, if I tell my slave to do something, he does it.”
Slave does not translate the same word rendered “servant” in verses 6 and 8. This Greek word normally means “slave” in the sense of a servant who is the property of the master. The question is whether or not it refers to the same person mentioned in verse 6. Most translations apparently differentiate between the two, though Die Bibel im heutigen Deutsch and New Jerusalem Bible translate by the same word in both verses. The word in verse 2 is more nearly a term of endearment than is this word, and it is valid to conclude that the word is used here solely as an illustration and without specific reference to any particular individual, as are one and another.
It may be necessary to say “a slave” or “one of my slaves” to indicate that the centurion is speaking in general terms.
Quoted with permission from Newman, Barclay M. and Stine, Philip C. A Handbook on the Gospel of Matthew. (UBS Handbook Series). New York: UBS, 1988. For this and other handbooks for translators see here .