Executive Summary
Executive Summary — Acts, English → Czech
Why it matters
The Acts curriculum extends the Romans Language Package into the most narratively concrete, doctrinally dense book yet handled in this pipeline for Czech. Acts 2:1-41 (Pentecost) is the theological anchor, but the PRD’s full-book mandate means all 28 chapters carry translation requirements. For the Czech Republic — one of Europe’s most secular societies — the central risk documented throughout this Language Package remains unchanged in kind but sharper in degree here: readers most often have no framework at all for a term or doctrine, not a competing wrong one. Acts intensifies this because its Critical-tier content (repentance, salvation, justification, the Spirit’s personal agency) must land inside sermons and courtroom narrative, not sustained argument — a harder teaching environment than Romans provided.
Key findings
- 82 total glossary terms are now binding for this curriculum: 47 inherited verbatim from the Romans baseline, 35 newly introduced by Acts (
translation_memory.json). - 47 of those 82 terms are Critical or High risk (15 Critical, 32 High), each requiring mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence per the escalation rules.
- 46 total doctrines are tracked in
doctrine_risk_registry.json(Acts): 27 require mandatory human theologian review (12 Critical + 15 High), 16 require native speaker review (Medium), and 4 require automated review only (Low). - Two genuinely new failure patterns appear in Acts that the Romans baseline did not need to address: terms that are too familiar with the wrong content (
křest/baptism defaulting to folk-cultural infant christening;sektaimporting a harsh modern cult connotation) rather than the baseline’s usual pattern of terms that are linguistically present but conceptually empty (pokání,Letnice,posvěcení). - Acts 2:36 (“Lord and Christ”) and Acts 15:11 (grace+faith+Lordship+salvation in one clause) are identified as the two highest-density Critical-term compressions in the entire two-curriculum pipeline to date.
Risks
- Highest risk:
spasení(salvation) andpokání(repentance) — the former archaic-empty, the latter both archaic-empty AND at risk of narrowing to mere private regret — sit at the exact center of the core passage’s climax and imperative (Acts 2:21, 38, 40) with no epistolary space to unpack them slowly. - Compounding risk: Acts 2:36’s “Pán a Mesiáš” and Acts 15:11’s four-term clause stack multiple Critical/High terms together at the two passages this curriculum treats as non-negotiable verbatim-consistency verses.
- Cross-curriculum consistency risk: Acts 13:38-39 and 15:10-11 must match the Romans 3-4 justification vocabulary byte-for-byte; any drift here damages both curricula simultaneously.
- Doctrinal-bias risk (external): Překlad nového světa (Jehovah’s Witnesses) circulates a Czech translation with documented anti-Trinitarian rendering patterns at exactly the verses (Acts 2:36, 7:59-60, 20:28) this curriculum treats as Critical; any back-translation match must be escalated at forbidden-substitution priority.
Opportunities
- Czech secular and national history supplies unusually strong, ready-made teaching bridges not available in most other Language Packages: the 20th-century Communist-era persecution of churches (Persecution and Bold Witness), the “cesta do Damašku” idiom already live in secular political commentary (Conversion of Paul), and the Cyril-and-Methodius national Christianization narrative, commemorated by a Czech state holiday (Great Commission Fulfilled).
- The ordinary Czech legal sense of
svědek(witness) is a rare case where the secular default MEETS the doctrinal need rather than competing with it — a genuine asset for Persecution and Bold Witness teaching material. - Paul’s Areopagus address (Acts 17) offers a positive, textually-grounded register model for engaging a religiously indifferent audience without confrontation, directly transferable to this curriculum’s own tone requirements.
Recommended actions
- Load
translation_memory.json,bible_term_registry.json, anddoctrine_risk_registry.json(Acts versions) alongside the unmodified Romans baseline files before any Phase 2 segment translation; treat the Acts files as additive, never as a replacement. - Route all 27 Critical/High doctrines and their associated 47 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian review; do not permit native-speaker-only review to close out any of these occurrences.
- Apply the two new forbidden-substitution directions (
sekta,křest) with equal discipline to the baseline’s original eight forbidden substitutions — these run in the opposite risk direction and are easy to under-flag if reviewers assume this package’s risk is always “too little content.” - Enforce byte-identical vocabulary between Acts 13:38-39/15:10-11 and the Romans 3-4 justification material as a hard cross-curriculum gate before either document is marked complete.
- Confirm the YouVersion numeric ID (
509, ČEP) against the live catalog before first production hyperlink generation, per05_translation_landscape.mdSection 5’s verification note.
This summary synthesizes 07_semantic_analysis.md, 08_core_glossary.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, 04_comparative_theology.md, 05_translation_landscape.md, 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, and the Acts assets/translation_memory.json / bible_term_registry.json / doctrine_risk_registry.json. It must be read alongside the unmodified Romans baseline executive materials, which this document extends and does not replace.