A quote from the (April 7th) Abilene Reporter News article:
The challenge of any translation of the Bible — or any other book — is figuring out how to handle gender, said Dr. Mark W. Hamilton, professor of Old Testament and associate dean of Abilene Christian University’s graduate school of theology.
Hebrew has nouns that can be both masculine and feminine, he said, and Greek has “those two plus neuter,” he said.
“English of course does not mark nouns by gender, so already we have an issue,” Hamilton said.
For biblical translators, rendering language about human beings is a bit easier than translating language explicitly about God, Hamilton said.
“The ancient writers rarely intended to distinguish genders when it came to moral injunctions, etc., and they explicitly state that all humans are made in God’s image,” he said. To Hamilton, that makes it both sensible and even necessary to translate certain terms previously translated as “men” as “people,” or “brothers” as “brothers and sisters.”