Because the Gathas are written in an archaic form of Avestan close to nothing else that survives, and because they are compressed, allusive religious poetry rather than plain narrative, translating them has remained one of the most contested tasks in the study of any scripture; specialists working from the same seventeen hymns have produced renderings that differ not only on details but on the basic sense of entire verses, disagreeing over whether a given line is a statement, a question or an exhortation, and over who is speaking within it.
Some of the disagreement is grammatical, since Old Avestan case endings are frequently ambiguous or damaged in the surviving manuscript tradition, and some is interpretive, since translators working from within the Zoroastrian community and translators working as outside philologists have not always agreed on how much later doctrine should be read back into Zarathushtra's own words.
What is not contested is the Gathas' place in living practice: Zoroastrian priests continue to recite them within the Yasna liturgy much as they have for centuries, and lines from them are taught to children at their initiation into the faith, so that a text scholars still cannot agree on the plain meaning of remains, for practicing Zoroastrians, closer to memorized prayer than to a puzzle awaiting solution.