Executive Summary

1 Corinthians 1–16 | French Language Package (Smart Brevity)

Core passage: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 | Curriculum doctrines: 10 | Full-book coverage: all 16 chapters reviewed, none silently omitted.

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Why it matters

1 Corinthians is a denser, higher-stakes translation problem than the Romans baseline it extends. Where Romans introduced 2 Critical-risk doctrines and 6 automated-only doctrines, 1 Corinthians introduces 5 Critical-risk doctrines and zero automated-only doctrines — every single doctrine in this curriculum requires at least native-speaker review, and 16 of 21 (76%) require mandatory human theologian sign-off. The letter concentrates sacramental language (the Lord’s Supper), contested gender-order language, charismatic phenomena, and the fullest New Testament resurrection argument into one document, and French — unlike some destination languages in this pipeline — suffers from too much precise, tradition-loaded vocabulary rather than too little, meaning nearly every hard verse has multiple “correct-looking” French renderings that each silently favor a different confessional tradition.

Key findings

• 106 tracked terms in the new translation_memory.json: 26 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline package, 80 new to this curriculum.
• 31 of 106 terms (29%) are Critical or High risk — 8 Critical (resurrection [ch. 15 context], fire-testing/purgatory collision, κεφαλή/head, body-and-blood, remembrance, love/ἀγάπη, the resurrection verb, resurrection-of-the-dead) and 23 High (grace, saints, church, lord, stumbling block, deliver-to-Satan, Passover, body, temple-of-the-Spirit, liberty/ἐξουσία, tradition, Lord’s Supper term, discern-the-body, body-of-Christ-ecclesial, Spirit-baptism, tongues, be-silent, appeared, died-for-our-sins, anathema, and others).
• 16 of 21 doctrines (76%) require mandatory human theologian review, versus 12 of 21 (57%) in the Romans baseline — a measurably higher-oversight curriculum.
• Three decisions are explicitly unresolved pending theologian ruling and must not be defaulted silently: κεφαλή (“tête” vs. “chef,” ch. 11), the σῶμα-καὶ-αἷμα/ἀνάμνησις eucharistic cluster’s exact phrasing discipline (ch. 11), and formal sign-off on “amour” over “charité” for ἀγάπη (ch. 13) — the last already selected in the glossary but requiring documented confirmation, not silent inheritance.
• One purely mechanical, high-probability error risk exists nowhere else in the pipeline so far: “la Pâque” (no ‘s’, Passover, 5:7) versus “Pâques” (with ‘s’, Easter) — a single dropped or added letter silently swaps Paul’s typological referent.

Risks

• Sacramental over-determination (ch. 11): every French rendering of “corps et sang,” “coupe,” and “la Cène” is already claimed by a specific eucharistic tradition (Catholic transubstantiation, Lutheran real presence, Reformed real spiritual presence, evangelical memorialism); the base translation must stay maximally neutral, which is a harder discipline than finding a missing word.
• “Les saints” narrowing (1:2, 6:1-2, 14:33, 16:1,15): French Catholic-cultural gravity toward canonized intercessors is the single most repeated collision in the letter; every occurrence needs the mandatory “tous les croyants” gloss, making consistency of application — not comprehension of the rule — the operational risk.
• κεφαλή and 14:34-35: live, cross-denominational complementarian/egalitarian debate; French “chef” overstates hierarchy, “tête” underspecifies it, and no neutral word exists. Silent resolution in either direction is the single highest-severity risk in this package.
• “Charité” reversion (ch. 13): Catholic-formed reviewers may expect or request the historic Vulgate/Crampon rendering, which has narrowed in modern French to almsgiving; the correct choice (“amour”) is counterintuitive to some reviewers and needs pre-documentation, not just correctness.
• Secular flattening of “résurrection” (ch. 15): the doctrinal center of the whole curriculum is exposed to the same metaphor-drift risk documented at baseline for Romans, now elevated to Critical because it governs the core passage itself.
• Purgatory collision (3:10-15): a historically live French Catholic/Protestant fault line that this curriculum’s Protestant-leaning exposition must handle without either erasing the Catholic reading’s history or importing it into the base translation.

Opportunities

• French’s ecumenical translation tradition (TOB) gives this curriculum a ready-made neutral register for exactly the sacramental and gender-order flashpoints that are hardest elsewhere; recommending TOB as the reference YouVersion translation (confirmed in 05_translation_landscape.md) lets Phase 2 inherit that neutrality rather than construct it from scratch.
• The letter’s practical, congregational subject matter (unity, discipline, worship order, marriage, gifts) maps unusually well onto contemporary French pastoral concerns (declining institutional trust, charismatic renewal within Catholicism, secular family-law contrast with ch. 7), giving teaching material strong cultural footholds once the base translation is locked.
• Because most of this letter’s risk is neighborhood-crowding rather than vocabulary absence, Phase 2 quality assurance can focus disproportionately on disambiguation and consistency tooling (sense-tagging “corps,” fencing “scandale,” gloss-checking “saints”) rather than on sourcing new vocabulary — a more automatable class of check than the baseline’s vocabulary-gap problems.

Recommended actions

1. Obtain the three pending theologian rulings before Phase 2 begins on chapters 11 and 13: κεφαλή rendering, eucharistic-phrasing discipline, and formal “amour” sign-off. Do not schedule Phase 2 translation of these chapters until rulings are recorded in translation_memory.json.
2. Confirm the numeric YouVersion TOB version ID before any hyperlink generation (currently a placeholder per 05_translation_landscape.md §5.1).
3. Enforce mandatory native-speaker proofreading specifically for “la Pâque”/“Pâques” orthography as a distinct QA checklist item, given its high mechanical-error probability and low visibility to automated spell-checking.
4. Route all sixteen Critical/High doctrines and thirty-one Critical/High terms through human theologian review per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md before any segment touching them is marked approved in Phase 2.
5. Brief theologian reviewers in advance on the “amour vs. charité” and “corps et sang” neutrality decisions, since these are the two items in this package most likely to generate reviewer pushback rooted in prior Catholic liturgical familiarity rather than in translation error — pre-empting review friction rather than discovering it mid-cycle.