Core Glossary

translation_memory.json is the enforced glossary for every Phase 2 content-generation pass in this curriculum. This document summarizes its shape and the principles behind it; see the Glossary Risk Groups for the full per-term entries.

Composition

The glossary currently holds 47 terms spanning all four risk tiers, drawn from the doctrines identified in Doctrine Analysis and grounded in the cultural risks identified in Culture Analysis. Because English is the source language, every term entry’s translation field intentionally matches the term itself; the substantive content is instead in each entry’s:

• Doctrine risk tier (Critical/High/Medium/Low), reflecting communication risk within English rather than translation-fidelity risk
• Explicitly rejected alternatives — here, misleading popular substitutes or glosses drawn from secular, legal, or casual English usage, not foreign-language alternatives
• Notes explaining the specific false-friend drift, denominational contest, or obsolescence risk each term carries

Governing principles

1. False-friend drift outranks obsolescence — a term with a strong, confidently-held wrong meaning (justification, election) is treated as higher risk than a term that is simply rare or archaic (sanctification, exhort), because confident misunderstanding is harder to correct than a flagged comprehension gap.
2. Denominational transparency, not silent adjudication — where English-speaking Christian traditions genuinely disagree (grace and works, “being saved,” assurance, sainthood), this glossary states the curriculum’s chosen reading explicitly rather than assuming it is the only one an English-speaking reader would hold.
3. Explanation over substitution — because there is no alternate English word to swap in for a false-friend term without losing established theological and translation-historical weight, this glossary’s strategy is exclusively explanatory: pair the term with clarifying context, not a different word choice.
4. Version-controlled and append-only in Phase 2 — if a new potentially-ambiguous term is discovered during content development, it is added to translation memory and the version number incremented, never silently improvised per-document (see the AI Translation Requirements’ Translation Memory Load and Enforcement Instructions).

Relationship to the Doctrine Risk Registry

Every glossary term’s doctrine field links back to an entry in doctrine_risk_registry.json, so a term’s risk tier is always traceable to the specific doctrine it protects — the glossary flags vocabulary, the doctrine registry explains why that vocabulary matters, and for English specifically, whether the underlying risk is secular false-friend drift, denominational contest among English-speaking Christians, or simple word obsolescence.