Executive Summary — Titus Language Package (English → French)

Why it matters

Titus is a short, doctrinally dense letter that hands the French translation team a sharper version of nearly every risk category the Romans baseline already flagged — plus a genuinely new category the Romans corpus never surfaced: everyday-sounding French words that are false-cognate traps (évêque, despote, hérétique, philanthropie, Épiphanie, discipliner, soumission). Get these wrong and the translation will read fluently while silently importing a different office, a different ethic, or a different Christ than Paul intended. This package makes the pipeline safe to run.

Key findings

• 91 enforced terms now govern Titus translation: 17 reused verbatim from the Romans baseline, 74 new to this curriculum — spanning all three chapters, not just the core passage (Titus 2:11–3:8).
• 21 doctrines are active across the full book; 7 are the curriculum’s named doctrines, 14 are additional load-bearing doctrines surfaced by full-book coverage (e.g., Deity of Christ, Divine Election, Atonement and Redemption).
• Term-level risk: 8 Critical, 23 High (31 combined) out of 91 total terms require absolute glossary enforcement with no permitted alternatives.
• Doctrine-level risk: 6 Critical, 8 High (14 combined) out of 21 doctrines are routed to mandatory human theologian review; 7 more route to native speaker review; zero doctrines are automated-only — a stricter profile than Romans, which had 6 automated-only doctrines.
• The single highest-stakes finding: no existing published French Bible (Segond 1910, Segond 21, TOB, Bible de Jérusalem, or otherwise) offers a ready-made escape from the “évêque” (overseer, 1:7) collision with the Catholic diocesan-bishop office — every consulted version uses the word, and this curriculum must supply an original mandatory gloss no prior translation provides.
• A second landscape-confirmed finding: Segond 1910’s rendering of Titus 3:5 as “le baptême de la régénération” and its ambiguous two-referent syntax at 2:13 are still the most-owned French Bible text in francophone households — this curriculum deliberately, and for documented doctrinal reasons, diverges from that precedent at both verses.

Risks

• Deity of Christ (2:13): a stray comma in “notre grand Dieu et Sauveur, Jésus-Christ” would split one Pauline affirmation of Christ’s deity into two referents — the same grammatical move the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Traduction du Monde Nouveau uses to deny it.
• Qualifications for Elders (1:5–9): “évêque” unglossed imports centuries of episcopal hierarchy into a text where the office is identical to “ancien.”
• Grace That Trains for Godly Living (2:11–12): “discipliner” is a punitive false-friend that would invert grace’s action from formation to chastisement — the curriculum’s first named doctrine hinges on avoiding it.
• Regeneration by the Holy Spirit (3:5–6): “le bain/lavage” and “régénération” sit directly on the Trent-vs-Reformation baptismal-regeneration fault line; the translation must render literally and let teaching material carry the interpretive weight.
• Submission to Authority (2:5, 2:9, 3:1): “se soumettre” collides with a live, post-2015 French cultural flashpoint (Houellebecq’s Soumission and gender-authoritarianism debates) unrelated to, but louder than, the biblical text itself.
• Avoiding Divisive Controversies (3:10): “hérétique” is the fluent, natural-sounding French word a translator will instinctively reach for — and it is exactly the wrong one, carrying Inquisition-era freight foreign to Paul’s narrow pastoral concern.

Opportunities

• French possesses clean, non-competing vocabulary for régénération vs. renouvellement (παλιγγενεσία vs. ἀνακαίνωσις) — a rare case of adequate lexical resourcing that should be preserved and cross-referenced for future Romans 12:2 consistency.
• The French Protestant “église” (body) vs. “temple” (building) distinction is a ready-made teaching resource for reinforcing that Titus 2:14’s “peuple” is the covenant community, not an institution or building.
• Segond 21 (YouVersion ID 1132) is confirmed stable and available for hyperlink construction, giving this curriculum a consistent, contemporary-register cross-reference edition distinct from its own (intentionally more precise) translated text.
• The letter’s own purpose clause (“so that the word of God may not be reviled,” 2:5b) supplies a built-in, textually grounded corrective for the household-code and submission passages, reducing reliance on external apologetic framing.

Recommended actions

1. Lock all 8 Critical and 23 High term-level entries in translation_memory.json before any Phase 2 segment processing begins; treat the forbidden-substitution list in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md as a hard pre-submission gate, not a style suggestion.
2. Route all 14 Critical/High doctrines to mandatory human theologian review in Phase 2 Step 17, with explicit priority on the core passage (2:11–3:8), which concentrates four of the book’s six Critical-tier doctrines.
3. Mandate the “évêque…c’est-à-dire l’ancien” gloss as a non-removable clause at every occurrence of Titus 1:7, verified by automated validation before theologian sign-off.
4. Never resolve the 3:5 washing/regeneration sacramental question in translation — enforce literal rendering and defer interpretation to Phase 3 teaching material, consistent with the baseline’s own justification/grace precedent.
5. Attach the surrounding voluntary/doctrinal framing clause automatically wherever “se soumettre” is generated, rather than relying on downstream editorial review to add it.
6. Carry forward the Exodus 19:5 footnote requirement for Titus 2:14 into every lesson template, given this curriculum’s confirmed low-OT-literacy target audience.