Executive Summary

Why it matters

Romans is the theological backbone of the New Testament, and Burmese carries a distinct but equally severe vocabulary risk: eight of its central terms (grace, salvation, resurrection, incarnation, sonship, deity of Christ, lordship, and messianic promise) have a ready-made, comfortable Theravada Buddhist or animist word that sounds like a natural translation but actually imports merit-accumulation, rebirth, or nat-spirit theology. Getting these eight wrong doesn’t just weaken a lesson, it converts Paul’s argument for a rescue by grace into a restatement of the very merit-based system Romans is written against.

Key findings

• The registry tracks 40 doctrines across Romans 1-16; 25 require mandatory human theologian review before any translated segment ships (8 Critical, 17 High).
• Grace and salvation are Critical specifically because Burmese Buddhist daily life runs on merit-making (ကုသိုလ်ပြုခြင်း) and the promise of eventual liberation (နိဗ္ဗာန်); a fluent-sounding translation using either concept directly contradicts the doctrine.
• Resurrection and incarnation are Critical because Burmese religious narrative defaults to a cycle-of-rebirth frame (ပဋိသန္ဓေ, the Jataka pattern of a Buddha-to-be’s many lives) that a one-time, bodily, historical event must be explicitly guarded against.
• Only 3 of 40 doctrines (Thanksgiving, Mutual Edification, Christian Fellowship) are Low-risk and clear for automated review alone.

Risks

• Merit-system syncretism: ကုသိုလ် (merit) or ကံကောင်းခြင်း (good karma) for grace, and နိဗ္ဗာန်ရောက်ခြင်း for salvation, each read as fluent Burmese but reintroduce a self-earned path to liberation that Romans explicitly rejects.
• Rebirth-cycle collapse: ပဋိသန္ဓေတည်ခြင်း for resurrection and the Jataka pattern for incarnation would fold Christ’s unique, historical acts into a recurring, cyclical framework.
• Institutional-vocabulary bleed: သာသနာ (Sasana, the Buddha’s own religious dispensation) is the natural word Myanmar Christians already use for “mission,” but it carries real risk of implying Christianity is one more Sasana-style institution rather than the proclamation of a person.

Opportunities

• Romans’ argument for a salvation that is received, not achieved, is a uniquely sharp counterpoint to a worldview built on lifelong merit accumulation, and lands with real force once vocabulary is locked down correctly.
• The Judson Bible tradition (in continuous use since 1834) already establishes strong precedent for the highest-risk proper nouns (ဘုရားသခင်, ယေရှု, ခရစ်တော်), which removes ambiguity for translators and reviewers alike.

Recommended actions

• Route every Critical and High risk segment (25 of 40 doctrines) through human theologian review before publication; do not allow automated-only review to touch these terms.
• Brief native-speaker reviewers specifically on the merit-system and institutional-vocabulary risk categories, which automated glossary enforcement alone cannot catch.
• Reuse this Language Package’s translation_memory.json for every Romans lesson in Burmese rather than re-deriving terms per document, per the two-phase pipeline design.