Executive Summary: Amos (English → French) — Phase 1 Translation Requirements

Why it matters

Amos is the first Old Testament / Hebrew-source curriculum built on top of the existing Romans (NT/Greek-source) French Language Package. It introduces a new source language (Biblical Hebrew, not Koine Greek), a new divine-name convention (“l’Éternel” for YHWH, kept deliberately separate from the baseline’s “Seigneur”/κύριος), and a core passage (5:18-24) of unusually compressed doctrinal density — three Critical/High-risk doctrines converge in six verses. Getting this package right protects French learners from the two live cultural landmines a Hebrew-prophetic book puts directly in front of them: rendering “holocauste” for the burnt offering (5:22) beside modern France’s Shoah memory, and collapsing Amos 5:24’s mishpat/tsedaqah word-pair into a single repeated French word, which would silently destroy the book’s most quoted verse.

Key findings

• 5 headline doctrines, 15 total doctrines mapped across all 9 chapters of Amos; no chapter contributes zero new theological content — full-book coverage confirmed in 08_core_glossary.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, and 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md.
• Doctrine risk registry: 3 Critical + 7 High = 10 doctrines requiring mandatory human theologian review (of 15 total); 4 Medium (native speaker review); 1 Low (automated only).
• Term registry: 6 Critical + 11 High = 17 terms requiring theologian-level scrutiny across the combined Amos + inherited-baseline term set (47 terms total: 35 new Amos-specific entries, 12 baseline Romans terms reused or fenced for contrast).
• The core passage (Amos 5:18-24) alone contains all three of: the Day of the LORD (Critical), Judgment on Empty Religious Ritual (High), and Social Justice and Care for the Poor (High) — flagged for mandatory theologian review as a single indivisible unit, regardless of sentence-level scoring.
• Two genuinely untranslatable-by-lexical-choice items were identified: the qayits/qets (“summer fruit”/“the end”) wordplay (8:1-2) and no direct equivalent French Sabbath-court term for “the gate” (5:10-15) without a gloss — both require mandatory footnoting, not a better word choice.
• A cross-curriculum divergence was formally documented: the English gloss “righteousness” now has two correct but different French renderings depending on curriculum — “justice” (Romans, δικαιοσύνη) vs. “droiture” (Amos, tsedaqah) — a collision risk for any reviewer or AI system working across both packages without this document.

Risks

• “Holocauste(s)” (Amos 5:22) — the single highest cultural-collision risk in the curriculum; post-1945 French overwhelmingly reads this word as the Shoah. Mandatory footnote at first occurrence per lesson file, not merely once curriculum-wide.
• “Se repentir” leaking into God’s relenting (7:3,6) — low probability, catastrophic consequence: implies God himself sinned. Forbidden-term automated check plus theologian spot-review required.
• “L’Éternel”/“Seigneur” register bleed between Amos (OT covenant name) and Romans/NT material (κύριος confessional title) in any co-taught lesson sequence, especially Amos 9:11-12 alongside its citation in Acts 15:16-17.
• Secular French flattening, consistent with the baseline’s own documented laïcité concern: “les pauvres” read as welfare-state policy rather than covenant offense (2:6-8); “le jour de l’Éternel” read as a calendrically neutral day; “une famine… des paroles de l’Éternel” (8:11-12) read as generic information scarcity.
• Jewish-Christian sensitivity on Amos 9:11-15: France’s large Jewish community and the passage’s direct NT messianic citation require non-supersessionist, historically literate framing at every occurrence — flagged in 04_comparative_theology.md as requiring the most sustained care in the book.

Opportunities

• Amos 5:24 is among the most widely recognized verses from the Minor Prophets in secular Western discourse (Martin Luther King Jr.’s citation) — an unusually strong on-ramp for engaging secular French readers if the mishpat/tsedaqah distinction is taught explicitly rather than assumed.
• French Catholic social-activist heritage (Abbé Pierre, Emmaüs) and the Republican “justice sociale”/solidarité tradition offer a genuine, positive point of cultural resonance for the Social Justice doctrine, provided it is explicitly anchored back to Amos’s covenantal frame rather than left as generalized secular ethics.
• Reusing the baseline’s “action de grâce” phrase for the peace/fellowship offering (5:22) creates a positive, doctrinally sound intertextual bridge between the Romans and Amos curricula at no translation cost.

Recommended actions

1. Adopt assets/translation_memory.json (Amos) and assets/bible_term_registry.json (Amos additions) as the enforced Phase 2 term databases, loaded alongside — never instead of — the baseline Romans files.
2. Load analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (this Amos extension) into every Phase 2 system prompt processing Amos segments, in addition to the baseline requirements document.
3. Route all 10 Critical/High-risk doctrines and all 17 Critical/High-risk terms to mandatory human theologian review per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json; route the 4 Medium-risk doctrines to native speaker review.
4. Treat Amos 5:18-24 as a single indivisible review unit in Phase 2 batch processing — do not split 5:18-20 from 5:21-24 across parallel workers.
5. Enforce mandatory footnoting (holocauste, the qayits/qets wordplay, Sikkuth/Kiyyun’s LXX variant, naziréen/Nazaréen) as a structural requirement in the lesson-generation pipeline, not an optional editorial nicety.