Executive Summary — Matthew 1–28 (English → Czech)

Curriculum: Matthew 1–28 | Core passage: Matthew 5:1–12 (the Beatitudes) | Language Package: Czech, extending the established Romans baseline

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Why it matters

The Czech Republic is one of the most secular societies in Europe. The Romans baseline already established that the dominant translation risk here is conceptual vacancy, not doctrinal collision — Czech Bible vocabulary is linguistically stable but often carries either zero live religious content or a competing, ordinary secular meaning. Matthew intensifies this pattern sharply: as a narrative-and-teaching Gospel rather than an epistle, it is saturated with concrete nouns (Sabbath, ransom, hell, yoke, cross, keys, beatitude) that collide head-on with everyday Czech usage — several of them inside the curriculum’s own core passage. Getting this Language Package right determines whether a general Czech reader encounters the Beatitudes, the Great Commission, and the Olivet Discourse as living doctrine or as a string of archaic-sounding, unexplained, or actively misleading words.

Key findings

• 105 terms are enforced in this curriculum’s translation_memory.json: 36 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 69 newly introduced by Matthew.
• 54 of those 105 terms (51%) are Critical or High risk (23 Critical, 31 High), each requiring mandatory human theologian review per the escalation rules — a materially higher concentration than Romans, reflecting Matthew’s doctrinal density and its greater reliance on concrete, collision-prone vocabulary.
• 39 doctrines are tracked in doctrine_risk_registry.json: 17 Critical + 14 High = 31 doctrines (79%) require human theologian review; 6–7 require native speaker review; 2 are automated-only (a discrepancy in the registry’s own summary count vs. its enumerated list is flagged there for correction, not silently resolved).
• Three collisions are sharper than anything in the Romans baseline: “sobota” (Sabbath) = simply the weekday name Saturday with zero residual religious content; “peklo” (Gehenna) = a casual exclamation for any bad day; “výkupné” (ransom) = an everyday kidnapping/hostage payment from crime reporting.
• A new collision type not present in Romans: capture by Catholic institutional/canonical category rather than secular drift — “blahoslavený” (Beatitude) is the specific technical rank of official Church beatification, one step below sainthood, and it sits directly inside this curriculum’s core passage (Matt 5:3–11); “klíče království” (keys of the kingdom, Matt 16:19) is visually reinforced across the Czech landscape by Petrine-keys church iconography, risking an unconsciously imported papal-succession reading even among secular heritage-tourist readers.
• One documented rival Czech-language rendering to actively guard against: the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Czech Překlad nového světa is in active circulation and systematically softens worship-language toward Jesus, denies conscious eternal punishment, and undercuts co-equal Sonship — this curriculum’s renderings must never converge with those patterns.

Risks

• Core-passage risk is front-loaded: at least five Critical/High collisions (blahoslavený, chudí v duchu, tiší, dokonalý, pronásledovaní pro spravedlnost) occur within Matthew 5:1–12 itself, meaning the theological anchor passage carries a disproportionate share of this Language Package’s highest-severity translation risk.
• Structural, non-fixable gaps: “sobota” and “peklo” have no alternative Czech lexical escape route — the entire mitigation burden falls on mandatory first-use glosses, not word choice, since no better native term exists.
• Cross-document consistency risk: Matthew’s Great Commission (28:19), Peter’s confession (16:16), and the Beatitudes (5:1–12) function as this curriculum’s “thesis statement” passages, analogous to Romans 1:16–17 and 10:9; any drift in their rendering across lessons compounds doctrinal confusion for a reader with no independent framework to self-correct against.
• Denominational-framing risk: Matt 16:18–19 and 18:15–17 (church foundation, keys, discipline) require this curriculum’s own explicit tradition-appropriate doctrinal stance; defaulting silently to the culturally dominant Catholic reading would misrepresent the curriculum’s own theological position.

Opportunities

• Two genuine advantages, rare for this Language Package: “pokrytec” (hypocrite) remains a vigorously used, non-archaic everyday Czech word requiring only contextual reconnection, not conceptual construction from zero; and Czech Communist-era church persecution gives “pronásledovaní pro spravedlnost” (Matt 5:10) unusually live, if under-taught, historical resonance to draw on.
• The mandatory-gloss mechanism already proven in the Romans baseline is directly reusable and now has a clear, ranked priority list (see 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md §4) for sequencing theologian review efficiently across Phase 2.
• Matthew’s concrete narrative form — parables, healings, the Passion — offers stronger opportunities for the vivid, plain-language, narrative-first glossing this Language Package’s secular audience specifically needs, more so than Romans’ abstract argumentation.

Recommended actions

1. Sequence Phase 2 theologian review to prioritize the ranked highest-risk list: blahoslavený, peklo, sobota, výkupné, spasení, Pán, království nebeské, klíče království, jho, and the core-passage-internal chudí v duchu / pronásledovaní pro spravedlnost pair — before general batch processing begins.
2. Enforce the mandatory first-use gloss requirement with zero exceptions for all 23 Critical and 31 High risk terms identified in assets/translation_memory.json.
3. Lock in a single, curriculum-wide doctrinal framing statement for Matt 16:18–19 and 18:15–17 before translating any segment touching church authority or discipline, to prevent inconsistent denominational drift across lessons.
4. Maintain strict cross-document identical rendering of the three “thesis statement” passages (5:1–12, 16:16, 28:16–20), mirroring the discipline the Romans baseline already applies to 1:16–17, 8:28, and 10:9–10.
5. Carry forward the Romans baseline’s translation_memory.json and this curriculum’s assets/translation_memory.json together as a single enforced pair for every future Language Package extension in this pipeline (e.g., a future Gospel or epistle curriculum), rather than treating each book’s package as freestanding.

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See assets/translation_memory.json and assets/bible_term_registry.json for term-level detail; assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json and analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md for doctrine-level detail; analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md for the full ranked ambiguity list; analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md for the enforced Phase 2 instruction set.