Executive Summary

Why it matters

Romans is the theological backbone of the New Testament, and French carries a risk profile shaped less by competing religion (as in Hindi) and more by thirteen centuries of internal Christian history: a Catholic majority culture, a small but historically significant Reformed Protestant minority, and one of the most secularized populations in Western Europe. The sharpest single risk is that French Catholic and Protestant tradition use the same words for justification, grace, and saints while meaning importantly different things by them — a mistranslation here doesn’t sound foreign, it sounds like the other tradition’s theology.

Key findings

• The registry tracks 40 doctrines across Romans 1-16; 12 require mandatory human theologian review before any translated segment ships (2 Critical, 10 High), noticeably fewer than Hindi’s 30, reflecting a lower overall syncretism risk.
• Justification and imputed righteousness are Critical-risk specifically because French Catholic and Reformed tradition inherited opposite answers to the Reformation’s central question (forensic imputation vs. sacramentally infused righteousness), not because the vocabulary itself is obscure.
• “Les saints,” “l’Église,” and “vocation/appel” are High or Medium risk because their everyday French meaning (canonized intercessors, the institutional Catholic Church, a call to priesthood) is narrower than Paul’s usage and will be misread by default, not by error.
• Secularization is a distinct and separate risk layer: terms like “péché” and “élection” have lost or shifted their everyday meaning (a guilty pleasure; a democratic vote) for a large share of the intended lightly-churched or unchurched readership.

Risks

• Denominational conflation: a translator or reviewer formed in one tradition can silently import that tradition’s assumptions into “grâce,” “justification,” or “les saints” without realizing a choice was made at all.
• Secular semantic drift: “péché” as a light colloquialism and “élection” as a political process both risk trivializing or reframing doctrines central to Romans’ argument.
• Institutional narrowing: “l’Église” and “vocation” both carry default institutional/clerical readings in French that are narrower than the New Testament concepts they translate.

Opportunities

• Romans’ argument that justification is God’s forensic declaration, not a process of sacramental cooperation, gives this curriculum a natural entry point into the Reformation-era conversation that is part of French religious history itself, not an import.
• French’s built-in “alliance” for covenant usefully echoes the wedding ring (l’alliance), a resonance the glossary can leverage pedagogically for the Davidic and new covenants.
• Because both Catholic and Protestant French Bible traditions are long-established and textually careful (Segond, TOB, Bible de Jérusalem), this Language Package can draw on genuinely deep existing scholarship rather than build vocabulary from nothing.

Recommended actions

• Route every Critical and High risk segment (12 of 40 doctrines) through human theologian review, briefed specifically on the Trent/Reformation vocabulary overlap, not just translation accuracy.
• Brief native-speaker reviewers on the secularization-driven semantic drift category (péché, élection, vocation), which automated glossary enforcement alone cannot catch because the words are not “wrong,” just narrower or lighter than intended.
• Reuse this Language Package’s translation_memory.json for every Romans lesson in French rather than re-deriving terms per document.