Linguistic Gap Analysis
06 Linguistic Gap Analysis — 1 John | English → Bengali
Purpose
This analysis identifies where standard Bengali vocabulary is adequate, inadequate, absent, or dangerously “crowded” (already claimed by a competing religious framework) for the eight core doctrines of the 1 John curriculum. It extends — and never contradicts — the baseline Romans Language Package. Every term already settled in the baseline translation_memory.json (ঈশ্বর, যীশু, খ্রীষ্ট, ঈশ্বরের পুত্র, পবিত্র আত্মা, পিতা, পাপ, ধার্মিকতা, সহভাগিতা, বিশ্বাস, ব্যবস্থা, পুনরুত্থান, দেহধারণ, পরিত্রাণ, প্রেরিত) is treated here as fixed and is reused, not re-derived. This document’s job is to analyze the gaps that 1 John’s specific vocabulary opens beyond that baseline — principally around ἀγάπη/love, ἱλασμός/propitiation, ἀντίχριστος/antichrist, μένω/abide, and the πνεῦμα/πνεύματα (Spirit/spirits) discernment vocabulary of 4:1-6.
Full-book coverage: This analysis spans 1 John 1–5 in its entirety. The core passage (4:7-21) is the theological anchor and receives the deepest treatment, but every chapter’s load-bearing vocabulary is assessed below (see §F for the explicit chapter-by-chapter confirmation).
Citation note: 1 John has no established citation form in the baseline (Romans-only). This curriculum adopts the standard Bangladesh Bible Society / Bible Society of India convention: ১ যোহন (short form) or যোহনের ১ম পত্র (long form), verse numbers in Arabic numerals per the baseline’s YouVersion-alignment rule (e.g., ১ যোহন ৪:৮ book name in Bengali, verse numbers as “4:8” — confirm final house style with reviewer, consistent with the baseline’s unresolved Romans citation-numeral question).
A. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| Doctrine | Key Passages | Available Bengali Terms | Weaknesses / Gaps | Recommended Strategy | Risk Tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| God is Light and God is Love | 1:5; 4:7-9,16 | আলো (light); অন্ধকার (darkness); প্রেম (love, reused-adjacent to baseline register); ভালোবাসা (love, verb-adjacent) | প্রেম collides directly with Gaudiya Vaishnavism’s prema, the central devotional-erotic love category of the Chaitanya bhakti movement historically centered in Bengal (Nadia district) — Bengali readers’ first association with প্রেম-as-ultimate-reality is Radha-Krishna devotional love, not agapic self-giving. আলো risks syncretistic misreading as a metaphysical light-substance (Hindu jyoti/Brahman-as-light; Sufi nur) rather than a moral-purity/truthfulness claim. The predicate-nominative “God IS love” (identity claim) is easily flattened in translation to “God is loving” (activity claim), losing 4:8’s ontological force. | Retain প্রেম as the established Bible term (no viable substitute exists) but mandate reinforcing context at every doctrinally weighted occurrence (self-giving, sacrificial, demonstrated at the cross — 4:10) rather than left to stand alone. Retain আলো with a teaching note that this is a moral-purity claim, not a light-substance claim. Never render ঈশ্বর প্রেম as ঈশ্বর প্রেমময়. | Critical |
| Fellowship with God and One Another | 1:3-7; 2:24, 27-28; 3:24; 4:12-16 | সহভাগিতা (fellowship, reused Low); থাকা / স্থির থাকা (abide, reused High) | সহভাগিতা alone does not capture the conditional nature of 1:6-7 fellowship (contingent on walking in light). থাকা is an everyday, low-weight verb (“to stay”) that can default to a merely physical/temporary sense unless reinforced; adjacent risk of readers assimilating “mutual abiding” to bhakti indwelling imagery (an ishtadevata residing in the devotee’s heart) in a way that blurs the Creator–creature distinction 1 John elsewhere insists on. | Pair থাকা with স্থির (settled/fixed) in every doctrinally load-bearing occurrence (2:24, 27-28; 3:24; 4:13-16). Teaching note distinguishing covenantal, personal indwelling (Father, Son, and Spirit remaining distinct, believer remaining a distinct creature) from any devotional-merger or non-dual reading. | High |
| Confession and Forgiveness of Sin | 1:9; 2:1-2 | স্বীকার করি (confess); ক্ষমা করা (forgive); শুদ্ধ করা (cleanse); মধ্যস্থ (advocate); পাপের প্রায়শ্চিত্তীয় বলিদান (propitiation, new compound) | No single Bengali word exists for ἱλασμός/propitiation. প্রায়শ্চিত্ত alone is the standard Hindu/Bengali term for self-performed penance (pilgrimage, austerity, ritual expiation) and, used unqualified, directly reverses 1 John’s point that God himself — not the sinner — provided the sacrifice. শুচি/অশুচি purity vocabulary carries Hindu ritual-purity (shuddhi) connotations incompatible with moral cleansing from guilt. মধ্যস্থ risks assimilation to the widespread Bengali folk practice (shared across folk Islam and folk Catholicism) of seeking a pir’s or saint’s shrine intercession. | Mandatory compound পাপের প্রায়শ্চিত্তীয় বলিদান, never bare প্রায়শ্চিত্ত. শুদ্ধ করা preferred over শুচি করা throughout. Teaching note on মধ্যস্থ distinguishing Christ’s unique, heavenly, already-accomplished advocacy from ongoing human/saintly shrine mediation. | Critical (propitiation) / High (confess, cleanse, advocate) |
| Love for the Brethren as Evidence of New Birth | 2:9-11; 3:10-17, 23; 4:7-8, 11, 20-21 | ভাই / ভ্রাতা (brother); ঈশ্বর থেকে জন্ম নেওয়া (born of God, reused High); প্রাণ দেওয়া (lay down life); মমতা (compassion) | ভাই is grammatically male-coded in ordinary Bengali usage despite the inclusive apostolic sense (all believers); Bengali has no single-word gender-neutral kinship term for “sibling in the faith.” ঈশ্বর থেকে জন্ম নেওয়া must never drift toward পুনর্জন্ম — an exceptionally well-known, high-currency Bengali religious concept (reincarnation across the Hindu-majority and syncretic-folk population), making this a live and recurring risk given the term’s frequency (2:29; 3:9; 4:7; 5:1, 4, 18). করুণা, the tempting alternative for “compassion,” is the specific technical term for one of Buddhism’s Four Immeasurables. | Footnote clarifying that ভাই/ভ্রাতা denotes all fellow believers, not only men. Strict, letter-wide enforcement of ঈশ্বর থেকে জন্ম নেওয়া, never পুনর্জন্ম, at every occurrence — treat with the same absolute forbidden-substitution force the baseline already gives resurrection. Prefer মমতা over করুণা. | High |
| The Incarnation and Antichrist | 1:1-3; 2:18-23; 4:2-3 | দেহধারণ (incarnation, reused Critical); মাংসে (আসা) (come in flesh); প্রতিখ্রীষ্ট (antichrist, new); একমাত্র পুত্র (only begotten); শুনিয়াছি/দেখিয়াছি/স্পর্শ করিয়াছি (eyewitness verbs) | Bengali has no native word for “antichrist”; the nearest ready-made cultural equivalent readers may reach for is দাজ্জাল, the Islamic eschatological false-messiah figure familiar to Bengali Muslim-background readers — structurally similar role, but resting on an incompatible framework (Dajjal opposes a returning Isa within a theology that already denies Christ’s deity, crucifixion, and resurrection). Choice between মাংসে and দেহে for “flesh” affects register consistency with established idiom. | প্রতিখ্রীষ্ট (a transliteration-native hybrid: প্রতি- “against/counter” + খ্রীষ্ট) retained; দাজ্জাল never used. মাংসে preferred as the established Bible idiom for “flesh” (over দেহে). Retain the full eyewitness verb triad (শুনিয়াছি, দেখিয়াছি, স্পর্শ করিয়াছি) untruncated at 1:1-3 to counter docetism, Hindu māyā-illusion readings, and Islamic non-suffering Christology simultaneously. | Critical |
| Assurance of Salvation and Eternal Life | 3:14, 19-21; 4:17-18; 5:11-13, 20 | অনন্ত জীবন (eternal life, new Critical); সাহস / দৃঢ় প্রত্যয় (confidence, new High); মৃত্যু থেকে জীবনে গিয়েছি (passed from death to life); নিশ্চিত করা (persuade/reassure) | অনন্ত জীবন risks conflation with মুক্তি/মোক্ষ (Hindu liberation from the rebirth cycle) if its “unending” component is read in isolation from its relational anchor (“he who has the Son has life,” 5:12). More subtly, the very idea of settled present assurance about one’s final standing is doctrinally unfamiliar territory for readers formed by orthodox Islamic teaching (final judgment outcome unknowable before death) or by karma-based uncertainty about a future rebirth outcome — this is not merely a lexical gap but a conceptual-expectation gap. | Never allow অনন্ত জীবন to stand without its relational anchor nearby in surrounding text/notes. Render confidence passages with an explicit grounding clause (e.g., ঈশ্বরের প্রতিজ্ঞার কারণে / খ্রীষ্টে স্থির বিশ্বাসে) rather than a bare, free-floating সাহস, to make clear the assurance is grounded in God’s character and Christ’s finished work, not in self-confidence or self-assessment. | Critical/High |
| Overcoming the World | 2:15-17; 4:4-5; 5:4-5 | জগৎ (world, new High); জয় করা / বিজয় (overcome/victory, new High); বিশ্বাস (faith, reused) | জগৎ carries genuinely opposite valences within 1 John itself — the object of God’s saving love (4:9) versus the object believers must not love (2:15) — with no separate lexical item available to disambiguate; this is a structural ambiguity inherited from the source text, not a translation deficiency, but it is sharper in Bengali because there is no register-shift equivalent (e.g., no “world” vs. “World” capitalization distinction). জয় করা risks being read through renunciation/asceticism frameworks (Hindu sannyasa, Sufi zuhd) as the mechanism of victory. | Disambiguating translator note at every occurrence of জগৎ specifying which sense is active. Always pair জয় করা/বিজয় with the explicit phrase বিশ্বাসের দ্বারা (“through faith,” per 5:4-5); never allow victory language to stand decontextualized as if achieved through withdrawal or self-discipline. | High |
| Testing the Spirits | 4:1-6 | আত্মা / আত্মাসমূহ (spirits, new High); পবিত্র আত্মা (Holy Spirit, reused Critical); পরীক্ষা করা (test); ভুয়া/মিথ্যা ভাববাদী (false prophet); অভিষেক (anointing) | Bengali has no orthographic device (capitalization, honorific case-marking) to distinguish singular-personal “the Spirit” from plural-generic “spirits” the way English can — this is a genuine structural gap, not merely a lexical-choice problem. আত্মা is also the ordinary Bengali word for a departed ancestor-spirit in folk-Hindu practice and sits near folk-Islamic জিন (jinn) concepts; an unqualified plural reading risks activating either framework. অভিষেক is the standard word for Hindu ritual deity-anointing (abhisheka) and for royal coronation-anointing. | Since no script-level fix exists, disambiguation must be syntactic and absolute: always the full title পবিত্র আত্মা for the Holy Spirit; always an explicit qualifying phrase for tested spirits (e.g., আত্মাসমূহ, ভাববাদীদের আত্মা — “the spirits of the [false] prophets”) — never a bare, unqualified আত্মা in this passage. Teaching note on অভিষেক distinguishing the Spirit’s internal teaching ministry from any external ritual rite. | Critical/High |
B. Missing Vocabulary (No Native Single-Word Equivalent)
The following concepts require compound phrases or descriptive paraphrase because Bengali has no single lexical item carrying the required sense:
| English/Greek concept | Why no single word exists | Bengali solution |
|---|---|---|
| Propitiation (ἱλασμός) | The only candidate single word, প্রায়শ্চিত্ত, denotes self-performed ritual penance — the opposite theological direction from “God provided the sacrifice himself” | পাপের প্রায়শ্চিত্তীয় বলিদান (compound, Christ as God’s own provided sacrifice) |
| Antichrist (ἀντίχριστος) | No native concept-word; the nearest cultural analogue (দাজ্জাল) belongs to an incompatible theological framework | প্রতিখ্রীষ্ট (transliteration-native hybrid) |
| Only begotten Son (μονογενής) | একজাত is archaic/obscure to modern readers; no modern single word conveys “unique, one-of-a-kind, eternal” simultaneously | একমাত্র পুত্র (compound) |
| Advocate/Paraclete, forensic-intercessory sense (παράκλητος) | মধ্যস্থ approximates but does not fully carry the “called alongside” legal-advocacy nuance; উকিল is too modern/legalistic; সহায়ক is too generic | মধ্যস্থ retained as best available approximation, with mandatory teaching note |
| Perfected/matured love (τελεία ἀγάπη) | সিদ্ধ imports Hindu-Buddhist yogic siddha/siddhi (self-attained supernatural perfection) | পরিপূর্ণ প্রেম (compound, grace-given maturing, not self-attainment) |
| Sin unto death (ἁμαρτία πρὸς θάνατον) | This is a pastoral-descriptive category in the source text itself, not a fixed doctrinal term; no single Bengali word covers it | মৃত্যুজনক পাপ (descriptive compound, explicitly not a Catholic “mortal sin” sacramental category) |
| Gender-neutral “brethren”/siblings-in-faith | Bengali kinship vocabulary is gender-marked; there is no single-word inclusive equivalent to English’s now-common “siblings” | ভাই/ভ্রাতা retained with a standing footnote of inclusive intent |
| Come in the flesh, as a fixed doctrinal test-formula (4:2) | This is a formula, not a single lexical item, even in Greek | স্বীকার করে (যীশু খ্রীষ্ট মাংসে আসিয়াছেন) retained as a fixed, non-abbreviated compound |
C. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing
These are cases where Bengali does have an available word, but that word is already the primary or technical term of a competing religious framework, requiring deliberate “fencing” (contextual notes, compound qualifiers, or forbidden-substitution rules) rather than avoidance, since no unclaimed alternative exists.
| Bengali term | Competing framework that claims it | Fencing strategy |
|---|---|---|
| প্রেম | Gaudiya Vaishnavism’s prema (Radha-Krishna devotional-erotic love, Chaitanya bhakti movement) | Retain as established term; reinforce self-giving/sacrificial sense at every doctrinally weighted occurrence; never let it stand as a bare, unglossed abstraction in teaching material |
| আলো | Hindu jyoti/Brahman-as-light monism; Sufi nur mysticism | Teaching note: moral-purity/truthfulness claim, not a metaphysical light-substance or divine-radiance claim |
| প্রায়শ্চিত্ত (unqualified) | Hindu self-performed penance/ritual expiation | Never use unqualified; only within the fixed compound পাপের প্রায়শ্চিত্তীয় বলিদান |
| দাজ্জাল | Islamic eschatology (the false-messiah deceiver figure) | Never used for antichrist; use প্রতিখ্রীষ্ট exclusively |
| শুচি / অশুচি | Hindu ritual-purity (shuddhi) vocabulary | Avoid; use শুদ্ধ করা for cleanse/purify throughout |
| অভিষেক | Hindu ritual deity-anointing (abhisheka); also royal/priestly anointing rites | Retained (established Bible-tradition term, parallels খ্রীষ্ট’s own etymology) but requires a mandatory teaching-context note at each occurrence in 2:20, 27 |
| মূর্তি / প্রতিমা | Hindu deity images, especially the festival-specific association with Durga Puja (প্রতিমা) | মূর্তি (general/descriptive) preferred over প্রতিমা for 5:21’s closing idol warning, to remain theologically clear without gratuitous festival-specific provocation |
| সিদ্ধ / সিদ্ধি | Hindu-Buddhist yogic self-attained perfection/supernatural powers | Never used for “perfected love”; use পরিপূর্ণ/সম্পূর্ণ |
| করুণা | Buddhist technical term (one of the Four Immeasurables) | Avoid as primary rendering of compassion (3:17); prefer মমতা |
| পুনর্জন্ম | Hindu/folk-syncretic reincarnation (very high cultural currency) | Already forbidden by baseline for “resurrection”; equally forbidden here for “born of God,” with heightened vigilance given 1 John’s much higher frequency of new-birth language than Romans |
| মুক্তি / মোক্ষ / নাজাত | Hindu liberation-from-rebirth / Islamic-idiom deliverance-by-submission | Already forbidden by baseline for “salvation”; equally forbidden for “eternal life” |
| ঈমান | Islamic creedal submission to tawhid | Already forbidden by baseline for “faith”; reinforced here given 1 John’s repeated faith-tests (4:2-3, 15; 5:1, 5, 10-13) |
| আত্মা (unqualified, plural sense) | Folk-Hindu ancestor-spirit vocabulary; folk-Islamic জিন (jinn) framework | Never left unqualified in 4:1-6; always paired with a disambiguating phrase |
| ভাগ্য / নিয়তি | Fate/destiny (already fenced by baseline for election/providence) | Watch for incidental activation near 4:19’s “he first loved us” priority language — must read as grace-initiative, not predetermined fate |
D. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Term | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Antichrist | Hybrid — প্রতিখ্রীষ্ট (native prefix + established transliteration খ্রীষ্ট) | Pure transliteration of the Greek/English (e.g., an “এন্টিক্রাইস্ট”-style loan) would be opaque to lay readers; the ready-made native paraphrase (দাজ্জাল) imports an incompatible framework. The hybrid preserves recognizability (shares root with the already-established খ্রীষ্ট) while remaining doctrinally uncontaminated. |
| Christ/Messiah | Transliteration — খ্রীষ্ট (reused from baseline) | Never মশীহ outside Muslim-outreach material with explicit framing; 1 John’s own polemic (2:22-23) explicitly denies any framework separating Jesus from the Christ, making this baseline rule doctrinally load-bearing here, not merely stylistic. |
| Word of Life (Logos title) | Paraphrase-compound — জীবনের বাক্য | Not transliterated; বাক্য is the established Bengali Logos-title term (parallels John 1:1), and preserving the title-compound (not a looser “life-giving message”) retains the Christological weight. |
| Propitiation | Paraphrase-compound — পাপের প্রায়শ্চিত্তীয় বলিদান | No Greek-loanword tradition exists in Bengali Bible usage for this term; paraphrase is the only viable path, but must always be the full compound, never the bare root. |
| Anointing (χρῖσμα) | Native word retained, not transliterated — অভিষেক | Chosen over a transliterated “খ্রীস্মা” because অভিষেক is the actual established Bible-tradition rendering (and shares etymological logic with খ্রীষ্ট, “the Anointed One”); the Hindu-ritual collision is managed through context notes rather than avoided through transliteration. |
| Only begotten Son | Paraphrase-compound — একমাত্র পুত্র (over archaic একজাত পুত্র) | একজাত is understood by few modern readers; একমাত্র পুত্র communicates uniqueness clearly while retaining the Sonship phrase intact from the baseline’s ঈশ্বরের পুত্র entry. |
| Advocate/Paraclete | Native word retained — মধ্যস্থ (over transliteration or the legal loanword উকিল) | A transliterated “প্যারাক্লেত” would be unintelligible to lay readers; উকিল imports a modern secular-legal register mismatched to the heavenly, forensic-intercessory sense. মধ্যস্থ is retained with a mandatory fencing note (see §C). |
| Abba | N/A for 1 John (no occurrence in this letter) | Noted for cross-curriculum consistency only: baseline retains the transliteration আব্বা for Romans 8:15; no parallel decision required here. |
| Amen / Hallelujah | N/A for 1 John core text, but retained for curriculum consistency | If liturgical material accompanying this curriculum uses closing doxology language, the established transliterations আমেন / হাল্লিলূয়া (per baseline) apply without modification. |
E. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities in 1 John
Ranked by combined weight of (a) doctrinal centrality to the letter’s argument, (b) frequency of occurrence, and (c) severity of potential syncretistic or cross-tradition misreading.
- আত্মা: Holy Spirit vs. tested spirits (4:1-6). Bengali has no orthographic device to mark the English capitalization distinction between “the Spirit” and “spirits.” This is a structural, script-level gap, not a lexical-choice problem, and it sits directly inside the letter’s own explicit discernment test. Critical.
- “God is love” / প্রেম as God’s identity, not merely his activity (4:8, 16), against Vaishnava prema. The letter’s single most theologically central and most frequently repeated claim (ἀγάπη family recurs across chs. 2–5) collides with Bengal’s own historic devotional-love tradition (Chaitanya bhakti, centered in Nadia district). Critical.
- Propitiation (ἱλασμός) vs. প্রায়শ্চিত্ত self-performed penance (2:2; 4:10). Directly adjacent to the core passage; a single unqualified word choice here would invert the letter’s central soteriological claim (God provided the sacrifice, not man). Critical.
- Antichrist vs. দাজ্জাল (2:18-23; 4:3). Unique among the NT epistles in naming this figure explicitly; high risk that readers silently import the entire, theologically incompatible Islamic eschatological framework onto Paul’s — rather, John’s — very different figure. Critical.
- Sonship/only-begotten confession (4:9, 15; 5:1, 5, 10-13) vs. biological-sonship misreading. The letter makes confessing this Sonship the explicit salvation test (4:15; 5:1, 5); cumulative doctrinal weight across five distinct occurrences raises the pastoral stakes beyond the baseline’s single-instance caution. Critical.
- জগৎ (world): dual valence within the same letter (4:9 salvific object vs. 2:15 forbidden-love object). A purely structural ambiguity with no lexical fix available; risk is highest precisely because both senses occur within the same short letter and the same semantic field as 4:7-21. High.
- অনন্ত জীবন vs. মুক্তি/মোক্ষ, especially when read apart from its relational anchor (5:11-13, 20). Compounded by the letter’s climactic, repeated use of this term as its final theological payload. Critical/High.
- সাহস/দৃঢ় প্রত্যয় (confidence/assurance) vs. Islamic judgment-uncertainty doctrine and karmic rebirth-uncertainty (3:19-21; 4:17-18; 5:14). This is a conceptual-expectation collision, not merely a word-choice collision — the very posture of settled present assurance is unfamiliar or even theologically suspect to readers formed by either surrounding tradition. High.
- Come in the flesh / eyewitness testimony (1:1-3; 4:2-3) vs. docetism, Hindu māyā-illusion readings, and Islamic non-suffering Christology simultaneously. The letter’s explicit doctrinal test passage; three distinct competing frameworks converge on the same verse. Critical.
- থাকা/স্থির থাকা (abide) vs. shallow “temporary visit” reading and adjacent devotional-merger misreading (2:24, 27-28; 3:24; 4:12-16). Recurs as the letter’s central relational image across three chapters; risk compounds with repetition. High.
- ঈশ্বর থেকে জন্ম নেওয়া vs. পুনর্জন্ম (2:29; 3:9; 4:7; 5:1, 4, 18). Already forbidden by baseline analogy (resurrection), but flagged separately here because of far higher frequency in 1 John than in Romans and the exceptionally high cultural currency of reincarnation vocabulary in Bengali religious life generally. High.
F. Chapter Coverage Confirmation
| Chapter | Gap-analysis coverage | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Light/darkness (crowded neighborhood), confess/cleanse/forgive (missing-vocabulary propitiation backdrop), Word of Life (paraphrase decision), eyewitness testimony verbs (ranked risk #9) | Reviewed |
| 2 | Advocate/propitiation (missing vocabulary), antichrist (ranked risk #4), anointing (crowded neighborhood), commandment/world introduced (ranked risk #6 backdrop) | Reviewed |
| 3 | Born of God/reincarnation collision (ranked risk #11), lawlessness (built on baseline ব্যবস্থা), compassion vs. করুণা (crowded neighborhood), abide (ranked risk #10 backdrop), assurance/heart (ranked risk #8 backdrop) | Reviewed |
| 4:1-6 | Testing the spirits — Holy Spirit vs. spirits ambiguity (ranked risk #1), false prophet, anointing continuity | Reviewed — highest-priority section outside the core passage |
| 4:7-21 (core) | God is love (ranked risk #2), propitiation (ranked risk #3), only-begotten Sonship (ranked risk #5), perfected love, abide (ranked risk #10), confidence/judgment (ranked risk #8) | Full treatment — theological anchor of this analysis |
| 5 | Eternal life vs. mokṣa/mukti (ranked risk #7), overcoming the world/faith (ranked risk #6 continuation), water-blood witnesses, idols/mūrti (crowded neighborhood), sin unto death (missing vocabulary) | Reviewed |
No chapter of 1 John was found to be free of load-bearing gap-analysis concerns; every chapter is represented above in addition to its treatment in the doctrine vocabulary matrix (§A).
G. Handoff Notes for Phase 2
- All Critical-tier gaps identified above (§E items 1–5, 7, 9) require the same absolute, no-deviation enforcement the baseline already applies to its own Critical terms — these are not “preferred” renderings but forbidden-substitution rules.
- The আত্মা (Holy Spirit vs. spirits) structural gap (§E #1) cannot be solved by vocabulary choice alone; Phase 2 segment processing must enforce a syntactic rule (full title পবিত্র আত্মা vs. mandatory qualifying phrase for tested spirits) rather than relying on translation memory lookup alone.
- The জগৎ dual-valence gap (§E #6) similarly cannot be solved by vocabulary substitution; each occurrence requires a translator note recording which sense is active, to be carried into the segment cache per the baseline’s ambiguity-handling protocol.
- All new terms proposed in
analysis/08_core_glossary.mdand formalized inassets/bible_term_registry.jsonshould be cross-checked against this gap analysis before Phase 2 translation memory finalization; no new term should be added to translation memory without an explicit fencing or paraphrase decision recorded here or in the glossary.