Executive Summary — Mark Hmong Language Package (Baseline v1.0)

Why it matters

Mark is the second Hmong-language Bible curriculum built on this pipeline, extending the Romans baseline into narrative-Gospel genre for the first time. The core passage, Mark 10:35-45, compresses four of the eight assigned doctrines (Suffering Servant/Son of God, Necessity of the Cross, Servanthood vs. Worldly Greatness, Ransom for Many) into eleven verses — the single most doctrinally dense stretch of text this pipeline has yet processed for Hmong. Getting this package right determines whether Hmong-speaking learners hear the ransom saying (10:45) as Christ’s unique, sufficient, once-for-all self-gift, or accidentally assimilate it into familiar, repeatable Hmong debt-redemption or shamanic-appeasement categories.

Key findings

• Every one of the 8 assigned doctrines carries Critical or High risk except one. 4 doctrines are Critical (Suffering Servant/Son of God; Necessity of the Cross; Jesus’ Authority over Sickness, Sin, and Nature; Ransom for Many), 3 are High (Kingdom Breaking In; Faith and Discipleship amid Fear; Servanthood vs. Worldly Greatness), and 1 is Medium (The Messianic Secret, a literary-structural rather than collision risk).
• The TM contains 11 Critical-risk and 14 High-risk terms (25 total) requiring mandatory human theologian review before publication, per the registry’s routing rule — nearly a third of the ~89-entry Mark translation memory.
• hwjchim (power/authority) is now the single most overloaded root in the entire two-book pipeline, carrying three theologically incompatible senses within Mark alone (Christ’s inherent authority; delegated civil authority; the condemned worldly “lording over” example) on top of its inherited shamanic-collision risk from Romans.
• dab/dab qias (demon/unclean spirit) is the exact indigenous shamanic term, unavoidable and correct, but requires the single most important contrast-teaching in the curriculum: sovereign word vs. ritual negotiation.
• The Son of Man title (tus Tub ntawm Tibneeg) is a brand-new Critical entry with no Romans-baseline analogue: a deliberate humble-classifier choice that risks losing Christ’s Daniel 7 authority pole if under-taught.
• The Ransom/Substitution cluster (nqi txhiv, theej cov neeg coob, Vajtswv Txoj Kev Cog Lus) anchors Mark 10:45 and 14:24 and bridges positively to genuine Hmong debt-redemption and blood-oath customs — but that same bridge is the cluster’s chief danger, since both customs are repeatable/negotiable while Christ’s act is not.
• Full-book coverage confirms 15 of 16 chapters as active contributors; only chapter 6 is logged as reinforcement-only, per the mandated no-silent-skip convention.

Risks

1. Bare, unqualified hwjchim — the highest-ranked single risk in the linguistic gap analysis; silently converts divine authority, civil rule, or condemned domination into indistinguishable shamanic power.
2. nqi txhiv/theej cov neeg coob taught without the “once-for-all, non-negotiable” qualifier — collapses the Ransom for Many into a negotiated debt transaction at the letter’s theological climax.
3. dab/dab qias exorcisms taught without the sovereign-word-vs-negotiation contrast — assimilates Jesus into the shamanic (txiv neeb) framework as “a stronger practitioner.”
4. Conflation of Vaj Ntsuj Plig / ntsuj plig / txoj sia — a three-way anthropological fence (Holy Spirit / human spirit / vital self) with acute stakes at the blasphemy-against-the-Spirit passage (3:28-29), only five chapters from the psychē material at 8:35.
5. qhev (10:44) and kav lawv...qhev (10:42) — the same servant/master root vocabulary is deployed for both the honored, positive self-giving ideal and the condemned negative example within three verses of each other; requires a mandatory “rejected pattern” marker to prevent contamination of the reverent titles.
6. Ntoo Khaub Lig (the Cross) used identically for imitative discipleship (8:34) and Christ’s unique atonement (15:21-37) without disambiguating co-text.

Opportunities

• Mark 7:14-23 (clean/unclean) is a ready-made cross-book teaching asset: Jesus Himself relocates ritual defilement from external contact to the heart, directly resolving the dawb huv sanctification collision the Romans baseline could only anticipate. Future curricula should actively cross-reference this passage when teaching Romans’ sanctification doctrine.
• The theej root’s reuse (Romans’ propitiation entry → Mark’s substitution-for-many entry) is a positive, intentional cross-book reinforcement that should be explicitly taught, signaling doctrinal continuity across the two-book pipeline.
• Hmong debt-redemption and blood-oath covenant customs offer genuinely strong comprehension bridges for the Ransom and Covenant doctrines, provided the “unilateral and non-repeatable” corrective is consistently taught alongside them.

Recommended actions

1. Lock all 11 Critical and 14 High risk-tier TM entries as immutable pending formal TM-revision review; route all associated content through mandatory human theologian review before publication (7 of 8 doctrines require this tier; the 8th — Messianic Secret — requires native-speaker review at minimum).
2. Implement the structural, non-bypassable hwjchim three-sense qualifier enforcement described in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md §2 as a hard generation constraint, not stylistic guidance.
3. Confirm the “Malakaus” book-name citation convention against the live HWB/YouVersion catalog before any Phase 2/3 citation-format lock (currently a carried-forward [TRANSLATOR REVIEW NEEDED] flag).
4. Prioritize theologian review in the exact order of the 12-item ranked ambiguity list in analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md §4, beginning with bare hwjchim and the Ransom-for-Many qualifier.
5. Build explicit cross-reference teaching hooks between Mark 7:14-23 and the Romans sanctification entry, and between Mark 10:45/14:24 and the Romans propitiation entry, so the two-book Language Package reinforces rather than duplicates disambiguation effort.