Linguistic Gap Analysis

Unlike Hindi, French rarely lacks a word for a Romans concept outright — the gap here is disambiguation, not vocabulary. A handful of terms do require compound phrases or careful qualification to avoid a default misreading.

Terms requiring qualifying phrases

• Imputed righteousness (“justice imputée”): must be qualified against “justice méritée” (earned righteousness, explicitly rejected), since French has no single word that distinguishes credited from achieved righteousness the way the English “imputed” does on its own.
• Adoption (“adoption filiale”): bare “adoption” defaults to the modern legal-procedural sense (child-adoption agencies); the qualifier “filiale” is required to recover the full-inheritance, full-son-status sense Paul intends.
• Fellowship (“communion fraternelle”): bare “communion” defaults to the Eucharist in both Catholic and lay French usage; “fraternelle” is required to redirect to koinonia.
• Obedience of faith (“obéissance de la foi”): risks collapsing into either “obéissance” alone (generic religious duty) or being absorbed into a Catholic “faith formed by love” framework; the full phrase must be taught, not assumed.

Terms requiring register modernization rather than compounding

• Seed of David: Segond 1910’s literal “semence de David” is now archaic and, in modern French, “semence” primarily denotes literal or clinical seed; “descendance de David” is the required modern rendering.

Terms with no gap at all

• Covenant, resurrection, incarnation, gospel: all have single, stable, widely understood French words with no live ambiguity requiring compound treatment. These are among the lowest-risk terms in the glossary specifically because French inherited a single settled rendering.

Gap-filling strategy

Where French vocabulary is ambiguous rather than absent, this Language Package prefers a qualifying phrase over a wholesale substitute word, so the base vocabulary stays recognizable to readers from either tradition while the qualifier does the disambiguating work.