Linguistic Gap Analysis — Revelation (English → Cantonese)

Purpose

This document executes Phase 1 Step 8 for the Revelation curriculum. It answers four questions the Romans baseline did not have to answer at this scale, because Revelation’s genre (apocalyptic vision) and content (cosmic conflict, symbolic numbers, a corrupted-world-system antagonist, a consummated-marriage ending) introduce vocabulary categories absent from Romans:

1. Where does Cantonese have no existing vocabulary at all for a biblical concept, forcing coinage or compounding?
2. Where does Cantonese have too much existing vocabulary — crowded semantic neighborhoods where a term already carries strong, non-biblical cultural freight that must be fenced off?
3. Where should a proper noun or exotic term be transliterated (sound-borrowed) rather than translated for meaning, and vice versa?
4. Of all these decisions, which carry the highest risk of doctrinal distortion, ranked for reviewer attention in Phase 2?

This analysis assumes the Romans translation_memory.json (baseline) is authoritative and unchanged, and it extends — never contradicts — the renderings already fixed in 08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json. Every recommendation below is a strategy note for Phase 2 prompt construction and reviewer routing, not a new translation decision; where a rendering is already fixed in the registry, this document explains why it was chosen and what risk remains rather than proposing an alternative.

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Section 1 — Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

For each of the nine curriculum doctrines: the Cantonese vocabulary currently available, its structural weaknesses against Hong Kong’s dominant religious/cultural frameworks, and the recommended mitigation strategy for Phase 2 translation prompts and Phase 3 teaching notes.

1.1 The Return and Reign of Christ

Available Cantonese vocabulary	Structural weakness	Recommended strategy
主 (Lord), 基督 (Christ), 萬王之王，萬主之主 (King of kings, Lord of lords), 神嘅道 (Word of God), 阿拉法同俄梅嘎 (Alpha and Omega), 世上嘅國成為我哋主同佢基督嘅國 (11:15)	Every one of these is a sovereignty claim, and Hong Kong readers process sovereignty language through a live, specific political lens (post-1997 “one country, two systems” discourse, loyalty-oath controversies, PRC/HK relations). “King of kings” and “the kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of our Lord” risk being heard as commentary on this-worldly political authority rather than Christ’s cosmic, eschatological reign.	Every occurrence of these terms must carry an explicit doctrinal frame (“Christ’s authority over all creation and history,” not “over any particular government”) in teaching notes accompanying the translation. Never pair with contemporary political vocabulary (政權, 統治者 in the PRC/HK administrative sense) even as a rhetorical contrast. Route every occurrence to human theologian review per the registry.
快啲 (soon/imminence, 22:7,12,20)	Nearly 2,000 years have passed since this promise; Cantonese-speaking new religious movements (as elsewhere) have a history of date-setting speculation. 快啲 read baldly could sound like a falsified prediction.	Pair imminence language with teaching-note framing on God’s sovereign timing (2 Peter 3:8-9 register, even though outside this curriculum) rather than translating around the urgency. Do not soften 快啲 to a vaguer “eventually.”

1.2 The Sovereignty of God over History

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
寶座 (throne), 全能者 (Almighty/Pantokrator), 神嘅大能 (power of God), 奧祕 (mystery of God)	寶座 risks the mental image of the imperial “dragon throne” (龍椅) — itself doubly loaded since 龍 is also this book’s designated arch-villain (§2.2 below), creating an unintended clash of associations for a culturally literate HK reader. 全能者 must not be assimilated to the Jade Emperor (玉皇大帝), the folk-pantheon’s supreme-but-still-one-god-among-a-hierarchy figure.	Consistently qualify 寶座 with 神嘅/羔羊嘅 possessive markers so it never floats free as a generic regal image. For 全能者, teaching notes should state explicitly that this title excludes the very possibility of a pantheon — there is no council of lesser gods above whom God rules, unlike the folk-religious hierarchy topped by the Jade Emperor.
活物 (living creatures), 長老 (elders)	活物 visually/conceptually echoes the Four Symbols (四象: 青龍白虎朱雀玄武) of Chinese directional cosmology, especially since one of the four Ezekiel-derived creatures has a lion’s face and another an eagle’s — close enough to invite folk-cosmological cross-reading.	A one-time explanatory gloss in teaching notes distinguishing Revelation 4’s creatures (drawn from Ezekiel 1, worship-leaders at God’s throne) from the Four Symbols (directional guardians in feng shui/geomancy) is required at their first appearance (ch. 4).

1.3 Perseverance and Faithful Witness under Persecution

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
見證/見證人 (testimony/witness), 忍耐 (patience/endurance), 患難 (tribulation), 得勝 (overcome)	Hong Kong Protestant church culture already uses 見證 heavily for voluntary, low-cost personal-testimony sharing (見證分享) in worship services — a warm but low-stakes register. Revelation’s 見證 is frequently fatal (6:9; 12:11; 20:4). 忍耐 also overlaps with a strong secular Cantonese endurance-and-face idiom cluster (忍手, 忍氣, 死忍) oriented toward social self-control rather than eschatological hope.	Teaching notes at each occurrence of 見證/見證人 in Revelation should explicitly flag the register shift from “sharing what God has done for me” to “costly, sometimes fatal, public fidelity to Christ.” For 忍耐, anchor every occurrence to its stated ground — Christ’s own certain return and vindication — rather than let it float as generic stoic self-control.
膽怯嘅人 (cowardly, 21:8)	Risk of being read as a character-flaw judgment (“cowards are bad people”) rather than the text’s specific meaning: failing to persevere in the faith under threat of death.	Gloss as “one who abandons faith in Christ under pressure/fear of persecution,” never as a stand-alone personality critique.

1.4 Judgment of the Wicked and Vindication of the Saints

This is the doctrine with the single highest concentration of crowded-neighborhood collisions in the whole curriculum (see §3 below in full). Summary matrix:

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
生命冊 (book of life)	Near-exact structural parallel to the folk 生死簿 (register of life and death) kept by underworld magistrates (判官, 閻羅王) — alterable by bribery, ritual offering, or accumulated merit, a plot device familiar from folk religion, Chinese opera, and popular media (e.g. Journey to the West-adjacent underworld-bureaucracy stories).	Every occurrence must carry a note that entry is fixed by grace through the Lamb’s blood at the cross, never by appeal, bribe, ritual, or accumulated merit — the single sharpest positive/negative contrast available for teaching grace in this curriculum.
火湖 (lake of fire), 第二次死 (second death)	火湖 risks assimilation to the popular multi-tiered Buddhist/folk hell cosmology (十八層地獄), which is temporary/purgatorial — souls are eventually released, reborn, or promoted after sufficient suffering/merit. 第二次死 risks assimilation to reincarnation-cycle thinking if “second” is heard as “another one in a series,” rather than “final and unrepeatable.”	Explicit teaching-note pairing: 火湖 = final and eternal, not a stage en route to purification or rebirth; 第二次死 = a unique, terminal, non-cyclical verdict, never one loop of many.
按住佢哋嘅行為 (judged according to works)	Extremely close surface parallel to 功德 (merit) and karmic-ledger thinking (善有善報，惡有惡報) which is a live, everyday Cantonese moral-causality idiom, not a remote foreign concept.	Must be explicitly anchored as describing final judgment of those outside Christ, contrasted with the believer’s standing which (per the Romans baseline) is by grace through faith, never a parallel merit-accounting track available to believers.
忿怒 (wrath)	Overlaps with 報應 (karmic retribution), an impersonal cosmic-balancing idiom in everyday Cantonese speech (“一定有報應嘅”).	Anchor every occurrence to God as a personal, judicial agent responding to specific sin, not an impersonal law of moral cause-and-effect.
陰間 (Hades)	Central and unavoidable collision with ancestor-worship theology: 陰間 is the destination-realm actively maintained through Ghost Festival (盂蘭節) offerings and grave-sweeping ritual obligations by living descendants.	Frame consistently as a temporary, defeated realm under Christ’s sovereign key (1:18), not a parallel spirit-world requiring ongoing ritual maintenance by the living.

1.5 The New Heaven and New Earth

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
新天新地 (new heaven and new earth), 更新萬物 (making all things new)	Risk of assimilation to Daoist immortal-realm imagery (蓬萊仙島, 仙境) — an escape from the ordinary material world to a separate ethereal paradise, reachable typically only by the spiritually accomplished.	Teaching notes must stress the downward direction of Revelation’s eschatology (new Jerusalem descends, 21:2,10) and its physical, renewed-not-replaced character — this is the material creation restored, not an escape to a separate immortal plane reserved for spiritual elites.
生命水 (water of life), 生命樹 (tree of life)	Structural parallels to two distinct Daoist/folk-mythological immortality devices: the alchemical elixir (仙丹/長生不老藥) sought through personal cultivation, and the Queen Mother of the West’s immortality peaches (蟠桃/仙桃), widely known through Journey to the West and popular film/TV. Both are earned or specially granted to an elite few through cultivation or divine favor to specific mythic figures.	Both terms must be taught paired with 免費/唔使錢 (without payment, 21:6; 22:17) to keep the contrast with earned/elite-granted immortality explicit and available to all who are thirsty (22:17), not a spiritual achiever class.
同佢哋同住 (dwell/tabernacle)	Risk of being heard as an episodic, temple-shrine-style divine appearance (顯靈) rather than a permanent state.	Must never be shortened to a bare verb of “appearing”; keep the full relational-dwelling phrase and pair with 永遠 (forever) language from context.

1.6 The Church as Bride of Christ

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
新婦 (bride), 新郎 (bridegroom), 羔羊嘅婚宴 (marriage supper of the Lamb)	Cantonese wedding-custom vocabulary is culturally loud: 聘金 (bride-price), 嫁妝 (dowry), 過大禮 (formal betrothal-gift ceremony), 飲茶/擺酒 (banquet customs). A reader could unconsciously import a transactional betrothal-economics frame (who pays what to whom) onto this entirely covenantal image.	Teaching notes should state plainly that the “bride” is the corporate people of God prepared by God’s own grace (see 打扮好, “adorned,” §1.7), not a family-negotiated economic exchange; the “price” already paid is Christ’s own blood (5:9), not a bride-price paid by either party within the image.
打扮好 (adorned, 21:2; 19:8)	Superficial reading risks a self-beautification/self-merit frame (“she made herself ready” through effort).	Anchor to the wider Revelation 19:8 statement that the bride’s fine linen “is” the righteous deeds granted her — i.e., her readiness is itself a gift, consistent with the baseline’s grace-not-merit doctrine.

1.7 Worship of the Lamb

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
敬拜 (worship), 拜偶像嘅人 (idolaters)	This is the single most practically sensitive doctrine in the whole curriculum for a Hong Kong audience, because the text’s central drama — worship of God/the Lamb vs. worship of the beast/idols — must be taught to readers whose extended families very commonly practice exactly the kind of activity (incense, bowing, offerings at household altars, Wong Tai Sin, Man Mo Temple, Guanyin devotion, ancestral tablets) the text calls idolatry.	Teaching notes must state the doctrinal point (exclusive worship due to God and the Lamb alone) without becoming a blanket personal or familial accusation; distinguish the doctrinal category (idolatry as any object of worship other than God) from a pastoral posture toward believers whose relatives practice these customs. This is a native-speaker-and-theologian joint review item, not purely linguistic.
羔羊 (Lamb)	Shares the character 羊 with the zodiac sign 未 (commonly rendered 羊 in popular almanac culture, “Year of the Goat/Sheep”), and with generic livestock/food vocabulary.	Always retain the definite, titular form (“the Lamb,” 呢隻羔羊 avoided — use consistent bare 羔羊 as an established title, never modified by counters/classifiers that would read as livestock-counting).
香 (incense, prayers of the saints)	Extremely strong ritual-efficacy association: at Hong Kong temples, incense smoke itself is popularly believed to carry the petition to the deity, and technique (how it is lit, held, planted) matters ritually.	Explicit note that Revelation 5:8/8:3-4 use incense as pure symbol (identified plainly as “the prayers of the saints”) with zero ritual mechanics required — prayer reaches God directly, without any burning, technique, or intermediary object.

1.8 Symbolic and Apocalyptic Interpretation

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
龍 (dragon), 獸 (beast), 大巴比倫 (Babylon), 六百六十六 (666), 一千年 (thousand years)	This entire doctrine exists because Revelation’s genre is symbolic, and every symbol above risks either (a) over-literalizing (treating 666 as an arithmetic puzzle to solve, treating Babylon as a literal end-times geopolitical prediction) or (b) collapsing into a pre-existing Cantonese symbolic system with the opposite valence (dragon = auspicious, six = lucky).	A standing “how to read a symbol in Revelation” teaching note should accompany the first occurrence of each major symbol, explicitly modeling the interpretive method (identify the OT/first-century referent, name the theological point being made, resist both flat literalism and free-floating private interpretation) rather than leaving readers to intuit the genre shift unaided.
龍 specifically	See §2.2 below — the single most severe named collision in this entire analysis.	Requires its own dedicated, repeated clarification at every occurrence (12, 13, 16, 20), not a one-time gloss.

1.9 Assurance of God’s Final Victory over Evil

Available vocabulary	Weakness	Strategy
得勝 (overcome), 成咗 (it is done), 免費 (without payment), 有福嘅 (blessed)	得勝 risks a martial/heroic self-achievement reading (wuxia-genre “victory through skill and effort” is a dominant Cantonese pop-culture template). 有福嘅 reuses the 福 root already flagged in the baseline for New Year prosperity-culture collision (恭喜發財).	得勝 must always be traced back to its stated ground: “they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb” (12:11) — victory received, not achieved by martial or moral effort. 有福嘅 must be taught as eschatological covenant joy/favor pronounced by God over the faithful, categorically distinct from fortune/luck sought through New Year ritual or almanac consultation.

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Section 2 — Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods

2.1 Missing Vocabulary — Gaps Requiring Compounding or New Coinage

Cantonese (like Mandarin) has no pre-existing single word for several Revelation-specific concepts; the registry has already settled on compounds, which this analysis confirms as the correct strategy (rather than searching for a nonexistent single native word):

Concept	Gap	Coinage/compounding strategy adopted	Residual risk
second death (第二次死)	No native concept of a “second,” final death distinct from ordinary physical death	Literal compound “second + time + death”; transparent but requires explicit teaching that this is not a second chance at reincarnation	Medium — see §3.3
mark of the beast (獸嘅印記)	No pre-existing single word for an anti-divine ownership-mark counterfeiting God’s seal	Possessive compound “beast’s + seal-mark”; transparent	Low, once distinguished from talismans (see §2.2)
new heaven and new earth (新天新地)	No existing single term for a renewed (not replaced, not escaped-to) cosmos	Four-character compound already has precedent in wider Chinese Christian usage (echoes historic CUV/Mandarin Protestant tradition); adopted as-is	Low linguistically; Medium doctrinally (see §1.5)
Alpha and Omega (阿拉法同俄梅嘎，首先嘅同末後嘅)	Greek letters have no Chinese-character equivalent at all	Hybrid: transliterate the untranslatable letter-names, then append the meaning-gloss (“the first and the last”) already present in the source text itself (1:8; 22:13)	Low — source text itself glosses the phrase, easing the translator’s task
key of Death and Hades (死亡同陰間嘅鑰匙)	No existing idiom for “sovereign authority pictured as a literal key held over a personified realm”	Literal compound; residual risk lies entirely in 陰間, not in “key”	See §3.4
marriage supper of the Lamb (羔羊嘅婚宴)	No existing single term combining sacrificial/Christological “Lamb” with “wedding banquet”	Compound of two already-established terms (羔羊 + 婚宴)	Low, contingent on 羔羊 and 新婦 both being independently well-taught first
kingdom of the world becomes the kingdom of our Lord and his Christ (11:15)	No idiom for “cosmic regime-change” language that isn’t also political vocabulary	Full clause rendered literally, deliberately avoiding any single-word political-transition term (e.g., avoiding 政權交接/移交, “transfer of power/sovereignty,” which carries direct contemporary HK political resonance)	Critical — flagged in ranked list §4

2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Active Fencing

These are cases where Cantonese has abundant, well-established, high-frequency vocabulary already occupying the semantic space the biblical term needs — and that existing vocabulary carries a different, sometimes opposite, valence. “Fencing” means the teaching apparatus (translator notes, glosses, first-occurrence explanations) must actively wall off the biblical sense from the dominant cultural sense, not merely hope context disambiguates.

(a) 龍 (dragon) — the single most severe fencing requirement in the entire curriculum. Neighboring concepts already occupying this word in Cantonese: imperial authority (龍椅, 龍袍), Chinese self-identity (“descendants of the dragon,” 龍的傳人), festival celebration (舞龍, dragon dance; 龍舟, dragon boat racing — a major Hong Kong public holiday and international sporting event), fortune/vitality symbolism (龍馬精神), and feng shui geomancy (龍脈, “dragon vein” auspicious land-forms). All of these are positive, celebratory, identity-affirming associations with no negative valence in ordinary Cantonese usage. Revelation identifies this exact character’s referent as Satan himself (12:9), wholly evil, doomed to the lake of fire (20:2,10).

• Fencing strategy: Every occurrence in chapters 12, 13, 16, and 20 must carry (in accompanying teaching notes, not the base translation text itself, per the baseline’s translator-note convention) an explicit statement that the biblical text is making a specific identification of one cosmic figure — Satan — using imagery meaningful in its first-century context (drawing on ancient Near Eastern chaos-monster imagery, not Chinese culture), and that this is not a verdict on Chinese cultural dragon symbolism, Chinese ethnic identity language, or the Dragon Boat Festival. This must be repeated, not stated once, given how frequently and positively 龍 recurs in Hong Kong civic and festival life.
• Do not substitute a different word for the beast’s cosmic ally to avoid the collision (e.g., inventing a novel term) — the term 龍 is textually required (it is the correct rendering of δράκων) and softening it would itself be a translation distortion of a different kind.

(b) 靈 (spirit) as a bare morpheme. Already fenced in the Romans baseline (聖靈 must always be the compound, never 靈 alone), but Revelation raises the stakes: the book is saturated with spirit-world contact language (angels speaking, visions, a spirit-medium-adjacent “in the Spirit” experience of John himself, 1:10; 4:2; 17:3; 21:10). Cantonese 問米 (spirit-medium consultation) and 問米婆 (medium) are live, still-practiced Hong Kong folk services.

• Fencing strategy: “In the Spirit” (John’s visionary state) must be rendered and taught as the Holy Spirit’s own sovereign initiative granting revelatory vision to his prophet, categorically distinct from a medium’s practice of summoning or channeling a spirit on request. This distinction should be made explicit at 1:10, the first occurrence, and referenced (not fully re-explained) at each recurrence.

(c) 印 (seal) / 印記 (mark). Already present in the registry as distinct from feng shui talismans (平安符) and temple amulets (符). The crowding here is compounded: HK readers encounter protective seals/talismans in temple contexts, but also encounter “seal” (印) constantly in entirely secular contexts — official stamps/chops (印章) central to contract and property culture, itself a very “Hong Kong” commercial-legal image.

• Fencing strategy: For God’s seal (ch. 7, marking ownership and security), lean toward the security/ownership sense (an official chop of ownership, not a magical charm) — this is actually a helpful secular association to lean into, since Hong Kong’s contract/property culture already understands “official seal = binding, secure, cannot be forged” without magical overtones. For the beast’s mark (獸嘅印記), actively fence away from the talisman/lucky-charm association, since a “mark of allegiance” could otherwise sound protective/benign to a reader steeped in amulet culture.

(d) 義 (righteousness) in judgment contexts. The Romans baseline already flags 義 as Critical due to collision with the Confucian loyalty-and-honor idiom 義氣 (triad/gangster-film brotherhood code). Revelation adds a second collision layer: 義 applied to God’s own judicial verdicts (“righteous are your judgments,” 16:7; 19:2) risks being heard through the lens of a magistrate’s reputation for fair dealing (a “righteous judge” in the wuxia/courtroom-drama sense of an incorruptible official) rather than the forensic rightness of an infinite, personal God’s judgment.

• Fencing strategy: Distinguish “God is righteous” (his judgments are perfectly just because of who he is) from “a righteous official/hero acts with honor” (a human virtue displayed and judged by peers). Teaching notes at 16:7 and 19:2 should make this explicit; this is a Human-Theologian-review item per the registry.

(e) 見證 (testimony/witness) register collision. Detailed in §1.3 above — HK church culture’s low-stakes personal-testimony-sharing custom versus Revelation’s costly, sometimes fatal usage.

(f) 生死簿-adjacent bureaucratic-afterlife vocabulary cluster. 生命冊 (book of life), 按住佢哋嘅行為 (judged according to works), and 白色嘅大寶座 (great white throne) together reconstruct, almost point-for-point, the folk cosmology of an underworld court: a magistrate (閻羅王/判官) presiding, a ledger of deeds, alterable outcomes. This is not a single-term collision but a scene-level collision — the entire judgment tableau of Revelation 20:11-15 maps uncomfortably well onto a familiar folk-religious courtroom scene.

• Fencing strategy: Treat Revelation 20:11-15 as requiring a single combined teaching note (not just per-term glosses) that names the folk-cosmology parallel directly and states the decisive differences: (i) one judge, not a hierarchy of underworld officials; (ii) a record that cannot be bribed, negotiated, or ritually amended; (iii) the deciding factor for the redeemed is not the ledger of deeds but prior inclusion in the Lamb’s book of life (20:15b), i.e., grace preceding and overriding the deeds-record for those who belong to Christ.

(g) 六 (the number six) and numerology. 六 is one of the most positively loaded single digits in Cantonese commercial/folk culture (六六大順, “may things go smoothly,” sought after in phone numbers, car plates, addresses, wedding dates). 666 (六百六十六) inverts this so sharply that without comment, a HK reader’s instinctive reaction to “666” may be closer to “extremely auspicious” than “ominous,” the reverse of the text’s intended symbolic effect (falling short of 7, the number of completeness).

• Fencing strategy: Explicit teaching note at 13:18 stating the inversion outright: the number’s ordinary Cantonese “lucky” connotation is irrelevant to, and directly overturned by, its symbolic function in this text (imperfection/incompleteness, one short of the divine-completeness number seven).

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Section 3 — Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Revelation contains a higher density of untranslatable proper nouns and technical apocalyptic vocabulary than Romans. The following table records the rule applied and the rationale, organized by category.

3.1 Rule of thumb applied throughout

• Transliterate when the term is (i) a personal/place proper noun with no semantic content to translate, or (ii) a liturgical exclamation already established across the wider Chinese Christian tradition in transliterated form.
• Paraphrase/translate for meaning when the term is (i) a title or symbol whose meaning carries the doctrinal weight (a transliteration would strip the theology out entirely), or (ii) a compound descriptive phrase rather than a true proper noun.
• Hybrid (transliterate + gloss) when the term is a proper noun whose meaning is also textually significant (the text itself glosses it).

3.2 Decisions table

Term	Category	Decision	Rationale
Armageddon	Place name	Transliterate: 哈米吉多頓	No semantic content survives translation; already a symbolic staging-ground per the Symbolic Interpretation doctrine, so meaning is carried by teaching notes, not the name itself
Gog and Magog	Proper names (OT-derived)	Transliterate: 歌革同瑪各	OT-derived symbolic names for hostile nations; meaning requires OT background gloss regardless of how the name is rendered
Abaddon / Apollyon	Proper names	Transliterate + gloss: 亞巴頓 / 亞波倫 (meaning “Destroyer”)	The text itself supplies both a Hebrew and Greek name for the same figure and explains the meaning (9:11); hybrid approach mirrors the source text’s own method
Michael	Proper name	Transliterate: 米迦勒	Standard established Chinese Christian form; no meaning to preserve
Babylon / Babylon the great	Place name functioning symbolically	Transliterate the name (巴比倫/大巴比倫) but treat the referent as symbolic per teaching notes	The name itself is a real historical place-name (correctly transliterated), but its function in Revelation (coded reference to the corrupt world-system, likely Rome in the original context) must be explained, not built into the translation of the name itself
Alpha and Omega	Greek letter-names + their meaning-gloss	Hybrid: transliterate 阿拉法/俄梅嘎, retain the text’s own appended gloss “首先嘅同末後嘅” (the first and the last)	Chinese script has no equivalent for Greek letters; the source text supplies its own gloss (1:8; 21:6; 22:13), so the translation should do the same rather than trying to invent a native equivalent
Amen (as Christ’s title, 3:14)	Liturgical term functioning as a Christological title	Transliterate: 阿們 (established form), but flag distinctly from ordinary liturgical 阿們	Established transliteration reused from the baseline; the title function (naming Christ himself as the guarantor of God’s promises) must be carried by context/teaching note, not by inventing a different rendering
Hallelujah	Liturgical exclamation	Transliterate: 哈利路亞 (established form)	No translation attempt needed or historically made in the wider Chinese Christian tradition
Lamb (ἀρνίον)	Christological title	Paraphrase/translate for meaning: 羔羊	A transliteration would be meaningless (it is not a proper noun); the meaning — sacrificial, triumphant Christ — is the entire doctrinal point and must be carried in translation, not offloaded to a gloss
Dragon (δράκων)	Symbolic title for Satan	Paraphrase/translate for meaning: 龍	Same logic as Lamb — but see §2.2(a) for the resulting fencing burden this creates
Beast (θηρίον)	Symbolic title	Paraphrase/translate for meaning: 獸	Meaning (a specific anti-Christian power) is the doctrinal content; a transliteration is not applicable since this is not a proper noun in the source
Bride (νύμφη)	Ecclesiological title	Paraphrase/translate for meaning: 新婦	Doctrinal content (the church’s covenant identity) must be carried by the translated word itself
Number of the beast, 666	Numeral, not a word	Render as numeral: 六百六十六	Not a translation decision in the ordinary sense; the number itself (and its inversion of 六’s ordinary positive connotation) is the content — see §2.2(g)
Thousand years (χίλια ἔτη)	Numeral phrase	Render literally: 一千年	Deliberately avoid embedding any single millennial interpretive scheme (pre-/a-/postmillennial) into the translation itself; leave interpretation to teaching notes, per the registry’s existing guidance
Sword from his mouth (ῥομφαία)	Symbolic image, not a technical term	Paraphrase/translate for meaning: 劍, read symbolically	Not a proper noun; risk lies in genre (symbolic vs. literal), addressed by teaching note rather than by transliteration/translation choice

3.3 General principle for Phase 2 prompt design

Transliterated proper nouns (§3.2 rows 1-6) carry low linguistic risk (there is no meaningful alternative rendering to get wrong) but may still carry contextual risk if the accompanying teaching material fails to supply the necessary background gloss for a low-OT-literacy audience. Paraphrased/translated symbolic titles (§3.2 rows 7-10, 12) carry the opposite risk profile: the linguistic rendering is already fixed and correct, but the cultural fencing burden (§2.2) is high. Phase 2 prompts should route transliterated proper nouns to automated/native-speaker review for gloss completeness, and paraphrased symbolic titles to theologian review for fencing-note completeness.

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Section 4 — Ranked List of This Book’s Highest-Risk Ambiguities

Ranked by combined severity of (a) doctrinal centrality, (b) strength of the competing cultural association, and (c) frequency of occurrence across the book. All are already Critical-tier in the accompanying bible_term_registry.json; this ranking exists to guide reviewer prioritization within the Critical tier, since not all Critical terms carry equal practical risk in Hong Kong.

1. 龍 (dragon) — Satan’s title (chs. 12, 13, 16, 20). Highest-risk item in the entire curriculum. Uniquely positive, identity-level cultural association (ethnic self-designation, civic festival, imperial symbolism) collides head-on with the text’s flat identification of this figure as the wholly evil, doomed cosmic enemy. No other term in either the Romans baseline or this Revelation registry has an association this strong, this positive, and this central to in-group cultural identity (as opposed to a specific religious practice that not all readers share).

2. 拜偶像嘅人 / 敬拜 (idolaters / worship) — chs. 4-5, 9, 13-14, 21-22. Second-highest risk because it is not merely a conceptual collision but a live-relationship one: the text’s central worship-allegiance test must be taught to readers whose own parents, grandparents, or spouses may currently practice the very form of worship (household altars, Wong Tai Sin, Guanyin devotion, ancestral veneration) the text names as disqualifying. Requires the most delicate joint theologian/native-speaker pastoral framing in the whole curriculum.

3. 生命冊 (book of life) vs. 生死簿 (folk register of life and death) — chs. 3, 13, 17, 20, 21. Extremely close structural parallel (a heavenly ledger determining post-mortem destiny) but opposite operating logic (unbribable grace vs. negotiable bureaucracy). High doctrinal centrality because this is the pivot term for teaching grace-based assurance against the book’s most vivid available folk-religious counter-model.

4. 世上嘅國成為我哋主同佢基督嘅國 (11:15) / 萬王之王，萬主之主 (17:14; 19:16) — cosmic sovereignty language in a politically sensitive locale. High risk not because the doctrine is unclear but because the application is politically live: Hong Kong readers and possibly censors/authorities may read triumphalist sovereignty-transfer language through a contemporary political lens regardless of translator intent. Requires the tightest teaching-note discipline of any item in this list to keep strictly eschatological/doctrinal.

5. 火湖 (lake of fire) / 第二次死 (second death) — chs. 19, 20, 21. High risk because the competing folk-cosmological model (multi-tiered, ultimately temporary Buddhist/folk hell, 十八層地獄) is widely known through popular media as well as religious practice, making the “eternal and final, not a stage toward release” distinction counter-intuitive for readers steeped in that cosmology.

6. 陰間 (Hades) — chs. 1, 6, 20, esp. paired with “key of Death and Hades” (1:18). High risk because 陰間 is not a remote theological abstraction but the active object of a living ritual system (Ghost Festival offerings, grave-sweeping obligations) that most Cantonese families, including Christian ones, still navigate at a family level. Christ’s “key” must be taught as sovereign authority over a temporary, already-defeated realm, not as license to dismiss the pastoral weight of family ancestor-veneration practices.

7. 羔羊 (Lamb) — ~28 occurrences across the whole book. Ranked lower than items 1-6 not because the doctrine is less important (it is arguably the single most important Christological title in the book) but because the competing cultural association (zodiac/livestock) is comparatively weak and easily fenced with a one-time note on retaining the definite titular form; the frequency of occurrence, however, means even a small residual ambiguity compounds across dozens of instances, keeping it in the top tier.

8. 六百六十六 (666) — ch. 13. Ranked here because the inversion of Cantonese numerology’s most positively loaded digit is highly counter-intuitive and could produce an oddly comic or confusing effect (an “evil” number built from the “luckiest” digit) if the teaching note is skipped, even though the doctrinal stakes of getting the number itself right are lower than items 1-6.

9. 新婦 / 羔羊嘅婚宴 (bride / marriage supper of the Lamb) — chs. 19, 21, 22. Ranked here because the competing cultural frame (Cantonese betrothal-economics vocabulary) is strong but not doctrinally distorting in itself — a reader who briefly imports a bride-price mental model will likely self-correct once the “adorned by grace” and “purchased by blood” language of the surrounding verses is read, unlike items 1-6 where the competing frame actively contradicts the text’s meaning if left unaddressed.

10. 按住佢哋嘅行為 (judged according to works) — ch. 20. Ranked lowest among the Critical-adjacent items because, while the karma/merit collision (功德, 善有善報惡有惡報) is real, the immediately surrounding baseline-established grace/works contrast from Romans gives Cantonese readers of this curriculum (who will typically have already studied Romans in this same Language Package tradition) a ready-made theological framework to slot this into, reducing (without eliminating) the practical ambiguity risk.

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Summary for Phase 2 Handoff

• All Section 1 doctrine-level strategies and all Section 2 fencing requirements must be encoded as standing teaching-note triggers in the Phase 2 AI translation requirements document (Step 9), not left to translator discretion per-segment.
• The transliteration/paraphrase decisions in Section 3 are final and must be loaded alongside translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json before any Phase 2 segment processing begins.
• The Section 4 ranked list should determine reviewer time allocation in Phase 2 Step 17 (Doctrinal Fidelity Review): items 1-6 warrant first-pass, full-context theologian review before any batch approval; items 7-10 may be reviewed in standard queue order.
• No new Cantonese renderings are proposed in this document; all renderings referenced here are inherited from 08_core_glossary.md and assets/bible_term_registry.json and must be reused exactly.