Executive Summary — Titus (English → Japanese)

Why it matters

Titus compresses an unusually dense concentration of high-stakes doctrine — the deity of Christ, salvation by grace apart from works, regeneration by the Spirit, and submission to civil authority — into three short chapters, for a Japanese audience that is simultaneously biblically illiterate (needing everything explained from first principles) and carrying two live, well-developed competing frameworks (Buddhist karma/merit and pre-1945 State Shinto political theology) that can silently substitute for the letter’s actual claims if vocabulary is chosen carelessly. Unlike Romans, where risk is spread across sixteen chapters, Titus concentrates its highest risks into a handful of verses (2:11–3:8) that this curriculum is built around — meaning translation errors here have outsized doctrinal impact per word translated.

Key findings

• Zero Low-risk doctrines. All 14 doctrines identified for Titus carry Medium risk or higher; this is the most concentrated high-stakes doctrine profile of any curriculum built on this Language Package to date.
• 5 Critical + 5 High = 10 of 14 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review; the remaining 4 Medium-risk doctrines require native speaker review. Zero doctrines are automated-review-only.
• At the term level, 15 Critical-risk and 17 High-risk terms (32 total) require theologian-tier enforcement — nearly half of the ~70 terms tracked in the Titus translation memory extension.
• One single lexical decision (行い vs. 業) is the highest-stakes choice in the entire curriculum: 業, the standing Japanese word for Buddhist karma (自業自得), must never render “works” at Titus 3:5, the verse that explicitly denies works as salvation’s ground — a lapse here would silently reverse the letter’s central argument.
• Titus introduces the curriculum’s single most dangerous new collision (regeneration/παλιγγενεσία vs. 輪廻転生 reincarnation and secular 生まれ変わり “new me” self-help language) and its hardest pure grammar-transfer problem (the Titus 2:13 single-referent “our great God and Savior” clause, for which Japanese has no native structural equivalent to Greek’s Sharp’s-rule construction).

Risks

• Karma-collision risk (Critical): 業 for “works,” if it ever slips through at 1:16; 2:7, 14; 3:1, 5, 8, 14, converts a grace-not-works gospel into a merit-accounting one.
• Reincarnation-collision risk (Critical): 新しく生まれること for “regeneration” sits one semantic step from both 輪廻転生 (forbidden Buddhist reincarnation) and casual 生まれ変わり (secular self-help “new me” idiom) at the letter’s single most important soteriological verse (3:5).
• Political-theology risk (Critical): teaching submission to civil authorities (3:1) in a country with living historical memory of pre-1945 State Shinto totalitarianism requires explicit historical framing in both directions — against uncritical state obedience AND against uncritical collapse into Japan’s own hierarchical-conformity instincts.
• Grammar-transfer risk (Critical): the Titus 2:13 deity-of-Christ clause has no native Japanese equivalent to the Greek construction that forces a single-referent reading; a fixed, non-negotiable compound phrase is the only safe mitigation.
• On-giri reciprocity risk (Critical): grace personified as an active “trainer” (2:11–12) and directly contrasted with works (3:5–7) doubles the Romans baseline’s existing on-giri (恩・義理) collision risk within the curriculum’s core passage.
• Dilution risk (High, recurring): 健全な教え (sound doctrine), 監督 (overseer), and 長老 (elder) are all correct, established terms already weakened by heavy secular or age-honorific everyday usage and require active doctrinal-weight restoration at every occurrence.

Opportunities

• 相続人 (heirs, 3:7) rides a genuinely positive cultural bridge via Japan’s established adult-heir adoption/business-succession custom (養子縁組), making inheritance-in-Christ unusually intuitive for Japanese readers compared to most target languages.
• 実を結ばない (unfruitful, 3:14) and other agricultural metaphors land with native force given Japan’s deep rice/agricultural cultural imagery.
• 長老/監督 paired teaching (elder/overseer as one office, two functions) can neutralize both terms’ individual weaknesses (age-honorific drift; secular-supervisory drift) simultaneously if taught together rather than separately.
• The letter’s own before/after structure (3:3 vs. 3:4–7) gives natural rhetorical scaffolding for teaching grace’s non-transactional character to an on-giri-shaped audience, if the contrast is preserved sharply in translation.

Recommended actions

1. Lock 行い as the mandatory, invariant rendering for all soteriological “works” occurrences and add 業 to the Titus forbidden-substitution list at Critical tier, on par with the Romans baseline’s 解脱 prohibition.
2. Route Titus 2:13, 3:1–2, and 3:5 to mandatory human theologian review for every occurrence in every Phase 2 batch, with [TRANSLATOR NOTE] flags attached automatically.
3. Require the fixed compound 私たちの偉大な神であり救い主であるイエス・キリスト for the Titus 2:13 clause with no permitted paraphrase variation.
4. Pair every occurrence of 長老 and 監督 with explicit cross-reference to each other and to the 1:6–9 qualification list in all teaching materials.
5. Attach mandatory historical-framing sidebars to every submission-to-authority (3:1) teaching unit, addressing both the State Shinto-era and hierarchical-conformity-culture failure modes explicitly.
6. Carry the Titus-specific assets/translation_memory.json and its forbidden-substitution list forward as a permanent extension layer for any future Pastoral Epistles (1–2 Timothy) curriculum, given the σωτήρ/Savior title density and Πιστὸς ὁ λόγος formula both recur there.