Linguistic Gap Analysis

Some Romans concepts have no single-word Bengali equivalent, and some have two competing established equivalents drawn from different religious registers that this curriculum must choose between deliberately.

Terms requiring compound phrases

• Justification (ধার্মিক বলে গণ্য হওয়া — “to be counted/reckoned as righteous”): no single Bengali word carries the forensic, legal-declaration sense. The compound must never be abbreviated to just ক্ষমা (forgiveness), which loses the “declared righteous,” not merely “pardoned,” distinction.
• Imputed righteousness (আরোপিত ধার্মিকতা — “credited righteousness”): distinguishes righteousness credited to a believer from righteousness earned (অর্জিত ধার্মিকতা, explicitly rejected). No everyday Bengali equivalent exists; it must be taught.
• Obedience of faith (বিশ্বাসের বাধ্যতা): must resist collapsing into either “faith” alone or generic religious duty (ধর্মীয় কর্তব্য), a term that in Bengali usage reads as compliance with religious obligation rather than a faith-produced response.

Terms with two competing established renderings

• Salvation: পরিত্রাণ (the mainstream Christian term used in this curriculum) versus নাজাত (the Islamic-idiom term used in some Muslim-contextualized Bengali translations). Both are “established,” but they encode different soteriologies — this is a choice between two live translation traditions, not a gap.
• God: ঈশ্বর (used here) versus আল্লাহ (Islamic-idiom) versus ভগবান (Hindu-devotional). All three are real, current Bengali words for “God”; the choice of ঈশ্বর is a deliberate register decision to keep this curriculum in the mainstream Bengali Christian tradition.

Terms requiring transliteration rather than translation

• Christ (খ্রীষ্ট): transliterated rather than translated, since no Bengali word carries the specific Jewish messianic-fulfillment sense without importing unrelated connotations from either a Hindu or Muslim frame.
• Abba (আব্বা): kept as a transliteration in Romans 8:15 for the Aramaic intimacy Paul is invoking — and, uniquely among this pipeline’s languages, this transliteration happens to already be the everyday Bengali Muslim word for “father,” giving Muslim-background readers an unusually direct point of emotional access rather than a foreign-sounding term.

Gap-filling strategy

Where a genuine gap exists, this Language Package prefers an established compound already in specialist Bengali Christian theological usage over inventing a new coinage. Where two established but theologically incompatible renderings compete (as with salvation and God), it deliberately picks the mainstream Christian register and documents the alternative so reviewers recognize it rather than flag it as an unrelated error.