Amos — Executive Summary (Hmong Language Package, Phase 1)

Format: Smart Brevity.

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Why it matters

The Amos Hmong Language Package brings a second Old Testament-heavy translation problem set into a pipeline built on Romans, an epistle. Amos introduces the highest-density divine-name discipline problem this pipeline has ever handled (~80 occurrences of the covenant name YHWH, rendered Yawmsaub, distinct from Vajtswv and tus Tswv) and a genuinely novel doctrinal-collision pattern: God rejecting technically correct worship because it is severed from justice — the mirror-image of the Romans baseline’s atonement-appeasement risk. Get this wrong, and Amos 5:18-24 — the curriculum’s core passage and one of Scripture’s sharpest calls to justice — will be heard by Hmong audiences as either generic apocalyptic folklore, fixable ritual error, or fatalistic poverty-talk, inverting every one of its five doctrines.

Key findings

• 90 total translation-memory terms now govern this curriculum: 30 inherited verbatim from the Romans baseline (reused because they are cross-referenced or contextually relevant) and 60 newly surfaced by full-book Amos coverage.
• 16 Critical-risk and 24 High-risk terms (40 combined) require mandatory human theologian review before publication — nearly half of the entire glossary.
• All 5 assigned doctrines are Critical or High risk (4 Critical: Social Justice, Empty Ritual, Day of the Lord, Messianic Hope; 1 High: Sovereignty over Nations) — there is no Medium/Low-risk doctrine in this package, identical in shape to the Romans baseline’s own all-Critical/High doctrine profile.
• Amos is collision-dominant, not vocabulary-scarcity-dominant: its agrarian/pastoral/marketplace imagery (sieves, streams, scales, herding, grafting) overlaps unusually well with Hmong material culture, so most risk is fencing existing crowded vocabulary, not filling genuine gaps.
• Two Hebrew wordplays (Beit-El/Beth-Aven; qayits/qets) are formally untranslatable and require mandatory footnotes rather than invented Hmong puns.

Risks

• Divine-name interchange. Any silent substitution among Yawmsaub/tus Tswv/Vajtswv collapses the covenant-lawsuit structure of the entire book — the single highest-density risk in the package.
• Ritual-technique misdiagnosis. Hmong shamanic diagnostic instinct (a failed offering signals a fixable ritual error) runs precisely opposite to Amos 5:21-24’s point that the offerings were flawless but relationally worthless — this is the doctrinal engine of the core passage and the package’s top collision risk.
• Millenarian-folklore conflation. “Hnub ntawm Yawmsaub” (Day of the LORD) risks absorption into documented 19th-20th century Hmong messianic/end-times movement vocabulary — a risk with no precedent in the Romans baseline and requiring dedicated native-speaker consultation.
• Fatalism. Hmong hmoov (fate/fortune) vocabulary, already permanently forbidden for grace/election in the Romans baseline, must now be extended to forbid framing poverty as impersonal misfortune — otherwise Amos’s entire social-justice argument collapses into resignation.
• Messianic disconnection. Amos 9:11’s “fallen booth of David” can easily be flattened into a bare political-restoration promise if not actively cross-referenced to Christ, heir, and kingdom-of-God vocabulary at every occurrence.

Opportunities

• Amos’s agrarian imagery (flowing streams, sifting grain, planting/uprooting, fruit harvest) is an unusually strong asset for a Hmong highland farming audience — largely comprehension-free, positive cultural bridges rather than risks.
• Hmong clan-lineage and inheritance values offer a genuine positive bridge for the Davidic-restoration/messianic-hope doctrine, provided the humble-hut (not grand-house) imagery is preserved.
• The book’s concrete, institutional justice demands (courts, scales, wages) give Hmong discipleship content a rare opportunity to move social ethics from private piety to structural application, addressed nowhere else in this pipeline’s existing Romans package.

Recommended actions

1. Lock the three-way divine-name system (Yawmsaub / tus Tswv / Vajtswv) as a non-negotiable pre-publication audit item on every lesson touching Amos.
2. Route all content touching Doctrines 1, 2, 4, and 5 (Critical) and Doctrine 3 (High) to mandatory human theologian review before publication, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json; no automated-review bypass.
3. Commission a dedicated native-speaker consultation on Hmong millenarian/messianic-movement vocabulary before finalizing any Day-of-the-Lord content (flagged [TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED]).
4. Enforce the mandatory bidirectional Romans/Amos disambiguation note wherever the shared “Vajtswv txoj kev ncaj ncees” string appears in Amos 5:24 content.
5. Build cross-reference callouts (to Son of God, heir, kingdom of God, and the Future-of-Israel doctrinal thread) into the lesson template itself for all Amos 9:11-15 content, rather than leaving them to per-lesson discretion.