Executive Summary

Acts 1–28 | English → Fulfulde | Phase 1 Deliverables

Format: Smart Brevity Core passage: Acts 2:1–41 (Pentecost and Peter’s sermon) Curriculum doctrines: The Holy Spirit and Pentecost · The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles · Repentance and Baptism · The Church as Community · Apostolic Authority and Miracles · Persecution and Bold Witness · Conversion of Paul · Justification apart from the Law · The Great Commission Fulfilled

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Why it matters

Acts extends the Romans Fulfulde Language Package into narrative territory Romans never had to cover — real historical events, rites, offices, and titles (Pentecost, baptism, “the Way,” “Christian,” the Sanhedrin, circumcision) that must now be named directly rather than argued abstractly. Because Fulfulde still lacks a single settled reference Bible translation, and because Fulani communities carry an unusually deep, well-articulated Islamic scholarly tradition capable of contesting not just doctrine but lived religious experience (visions, tongues, Spirit-filling, miracles), Acts raises this pipeline’s theological-risk profile above what Romans already established. Getting this package right determines whether Pentecost, Gentile inclusion, and Paul’s conversion land as intended — or get silently reabsorbed into competing Islamic-folk or Islamic-theological categories.

Key findings

• 38 curriculum doctrines identified and risk-tiered across all 28 chapters (full-book coverage confirmed; no chapter silently omitted — chs. 18, 25, and 27 explicitly noted as reviewed with reuse only). 14 Critical, 13 High, 8 Medium, 3 Low.
• 99 total enforced terms in the Acts translation_memory.json: 47 terms inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline plus 52 new Acts-specific terms, of which 13 are Critical-risk and 31 are High-risk (44 of 99 terms, 44%, require theologian-level enforcement).
• 27 of 38 doctrines (71%) require mandatory human theologian review; 8 require native-speaker review; only 3 (Thanksgiving, Mutual Encouragement, Citizenship/Civil Authority) are automated-review-only.
• Acts adds a second risk layer beyond Romans: where Romans’ risks were concentrated in abstract soteriological vocabulary colliding with Islamic theology (grace, righteousness, justification), Acts adds narrative-experiential vocabulary colliding with Islamic-folk and Sufi practice (jinn-possession, hal/wajd trance, marabout dream-interpretation, barke, sihira, halal/haram, tawba).
• Eight items require genuinely new vocabulary with no prior Fulfulde equivalent at any risk level (Pentecost, baptism-as-distinct-rite, “Christian,” circumcision-as-salvation-basis framing, vow, elder/overseer office vocabulary, “filled with the Holy Spirit” collocation, and the ends-of-the-earth/without-hindrance bookend idioms).

Risks

1. Clean/unclean (haraamu/halaali, Acts 10–11) — highest risk in the entire curriculum. Deliberately shares the exact vocabulary of the fully developed, currently-practiced Islamic halal/haram legal-dietary system for a passage whose real subject is Gentile inclusion, not food. Default misreading as a food-law abrogation debate is likely without aggressive, repeated fencing.
2. Circumcision (taƴgol goɓɗi, Acts 15) — highest community-reception risk. Circumcision is a near-universal Fulani religious-and-ethnic identity marker; mistranslation risks not just confusion but a felt community-level insult unless every occurrence states the Council’s ruling concerns only the basis of salvation, never the custom’s value.
3. Repentance (tuubde/tuubuubuyee, Acts 2:38 and parallels) — most dangerous silent substitution. Shares its root with Islamic tawba; fluent Fulfulde prose will process without any signal that the doctrinal content has shifted, unless every occurrence explicitly ties repentance to faith in the crucified-and-risen Jesus.
4. Pentecost/tongues/Spirit-filling (Acts 2:1–13, the core passage itself) collides simultaneously, within eight verses, with two live regional phenomenological frameworks (jinn-possession/Sufi trance for Spirit-filling; ecstatic devotional speech for tongues).
5. Signs and wonders / power of God vs. barke and sihira (9 chapters) — the highest-frequency recurring collision in the book, compounded because barke is an active, socially normal practice many readers currently participate in, not merely a doctrinal abstraction to reject.
6. Son of Man vs. Son of God (Ɓiɗɗo Neɗɗo vs. Ɓiɗɗo Alla, Acts 7:56) — conflating these two complementary titles would leave one of two distinct Tawhid-based objections completely unanswered.
7. New-coinage collision risk: “Christian” (Kirisiyeenaaɗo) is one letter-cluster away from the unrelated existing word for “Christmas” (Kirisimasi) — a mechanical proofing risk requiring automated string-matching QA, not just doctrinal review.
8. No confirmed Fulfulde book-name for “Acts” and no confirmed YouVersion version ID/abbreviation — both are provisionally proposed (Kuɓɓule Nulaaɓe; placeholder {VERSION_ID}/{VERSION_ABBR}) but must be confirmed before any citation or hyperlink is finalized.

Opportunities

• Genuine, usable common ground exists and should be leveraged, not avoided: sihira (sorcery) is rejected by orthodox regional Islam too; jina (sexual immorality) and anti-shirk sensibility toward idols are shared moral ground; da’wah and tawakkul offer structural parallels to mission and providential trust; Yawm al-Qiyāma gives Acts’ “judgment to come” an immediate point of contact before pivoting to the distinctly Christian basis of acquittal.
• Fulani pastoralist culture positively resources several Acts passages: the yoke (kaɓirgel, Acts 15:10), shepherd/flock imagery (Acts 20:28), and communal-sharing customs (Acts 2:44–45, 4:32–35) all have strong, ready-made cultural vocabulary that helps rather than hinders comprehension — a rare asymmetry favoring this curriculum over some of its harder terms.
• Acts 23’s Pharisee-Sadducee resurrection dispute offers a valuable teaching device: showing that resurrection-skepticism predates and is broader than any single Islamic theological objection, reframing the discussion constructively.

Recommended actions

1. Load assets/translation_memory.json (Acts edition, 99 terms) and assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (Acts edition, 38 doctrines) into every Phase 2 session per the pre-flight checklist in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md v2.0 before any segment translation begins.
2. Route all 27 theologian-required doctrines and all 44 Critical/High terms through mandatory human theologian review before enforcement; prioritize the eight ranked ambiguities in 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md Part 4, led by clean/unclean, circumcision, and repentance.
3. Confirm the eight genuinely-missing-vocabulary items and all provisional coinages (artaare, Kirisiyeenaaɗo, Kuɓɓule Nulaaɓe) with both a Fulfulde-speaking theologian and a native speaker before wide deployment.
4. Confirm the YouVersion version ID/abbreviation for the actual deployment dialect before finalizing any hyperlink in Phase 2/3 materials.
5. Apply the Acts-specific escalation and forbidden-substitution rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md v2.0 without exception, especially the automated string-match check guarding against the Kirisiyeenaaɗo/Kirisimasi collision.

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See analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md for the full 38-doctrine matrix and chapter-by-chapter coverage. See analysis/04_comparative_theology.md for cross-tradition analysis. See analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md for the ranked ambiguity list. See analysis/05_translation_landscape.md for existing-translation survey and YouVersion linking status.