Executive Summary — English → Dogri | 1 John 1–5

Why it matters

1 John is being added to the Dogri Language Package as the second curriculum after Romans, anchored at the core passage 1 John 4:7-21 (“God is love”). This letter concentrates an unusually high density of doctrine that collides directly with the Duggar region’s own dominant devotional life — Vaishno Devi’s mannat vow economy, Raghunath Mandir’s Rama-avatar and darshan theology, and the Bahu Fort Kali shrine’s blood-sacrifice practice — more directly, verse-for-verse, than Romans did. Getting this right determines whether Dogri-speaking converts hear 1 John’s claims about God’s nature, Christ’s incarnation, and idolatry as the text intends, or hear them refracted through the region’s existing religious vocabulary.

Key findings

• 67 terms are now catalogued in the 1 John translation memory: 14 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 53 new to this curriculum.
• 43 of 67 terms (64%) are Critical or High risk and require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence — 18 Critical, 25 High. Only 18 Medium-risk terms (native speaker review) and 6 Low-risk terms (automated review) exist in this curriculum.
• All 10 doctrines in the doctrine risk registry route to human theologian review (6 Critical, 4 High) — a stricter profile than Romans, which had some doctrines routed to native-speaker-only or automated-only review.
• Two collision categories are new to this curriculum and not covered by the Romans baseline: (1) “born of God” / new-birth language colliding with the punarjanam/samsara reincarnation framework, independent of the baseline’s existing resurrection-vs-reincarnation guard; and (2) “seeing God” (4:12) and “idols” (5:21) colliding directly with darshan- and murti-centered devotional practice at Vaishno Devi, Raghunath Mandir, and Bahu Fort.
• 1 John’s own thesis statement, “God is love” (4:8, 16), lands on प्रेम — Dogri’s only viable word for love — which is already fully occupied by Radha-Krishna bhakti-devotional and Punjabi folk-romance registers; this cannot be solved by word choice alone and requires mandatory contrastive teaching at every occurrence.

Risks

• Highest-severity risk: the 4:2-3 incarnation-confession test (“Jesus Christ has come in the flesh”) is 1 John’s own criterion for distinguishing true from false spirits, set directly against Raghunath Mandir’s prestige Rama-avatar devotion; any drift toward avatar-adjacent phrasing inverts John’s own test rather than merely weakening it.
• Propitiation (2:2, 4:10) has no Romans-baseline precedent and no safe single Dogri word — the natural term (बलिदान/बली) is the same word used for animal sacrifice at the Bahu Fort Kali shrine; the mandated compound phrase must never be compressed under stylistic pressure.
• 5:20’s “true God” affirmation is the single highest-stakes translation-philosophy decision in the letter for the Deity of Christ doctrine and is a known point of doctrinal pressure in circulating non-Trinitarian (e.g. Jehovah’s Witnesses’ NWT-lineage) regional literature.
• Dogri’s thin independent Bible-translation ecosystem (relative to Hindi/Punjabi) means translators are structurally more likely to reach for a fluent Hindi Christian-literature word (अभिषेक, प्रायश्चित, संसार, सिद्धि) under time pressure — precisely the terms this package forbids.

Opportunities

• 1 John’s own closing command, “keep yourselves from idols” (5:21), gives this curriculum a rare opportunity to confront image-veneration directly and pastorally, using मूर्ति boldly rather than euphemizing it, while tying the command back to the letter’s positive center (love for the true, unseen God).
• The letter’s warm, pastoral register (“Beloved,” assurance, fellowship) offers strong material for building relational trust with converts from Dogra Hindu backgrounds, if “fellowship” (संगत) and “abide” (टिके रौह्ना) are taught with their full relational weight rather than as generic social terms.
• Because propitiation, advocate, anointing, and born-of-God all required newly coined compounds rather than borrowed Hindi/Sanskrit terms, this curriculum extends the Romans baseline’s own methodology (as used for justification, imputed righteousness, and adoption) into forensic/legal vocabulary that Dogri has never before had to express in Christian theological terms — a durable asset for any future Dogri curriculum.

Recommended actions

1. Route every Critical- and High-risk term occurrence (43 of 67 terms) through mandatory human theologian review before Phase 2 sign-off, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
2. Confirm all NEW terms in assets/translation_memory.json against the Bible Society of India’s Dogri Bible before wide deployment; revise to match any settled BSI rendering rather than compete with it.
3. Confirm the Dogri YouVersion version ID before finalizing any learner-facing hyperlink; use the [DOGRI_VERSION_ID] placeholder until then, per analysis/05_translation_landscape.md.
4. Exclude Jehovah’s Witnesses’ NWT-lineage, modalist, prosperity-paraphrase, and syncretistic guru-register comparison texts from influencing any Dogri phrasing, especially at 5:20 and throughout the “abide” vocabulary.
5. Attach the mandated harmonizing note (cross-referencing 1:9) wherever 3:9 or 5:18 is translated or taught, and the mandated textual-basis note wherever 5:6-8 is translated, per the escalation rules in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md.