Executive Summary: Ephesians Kannada Translation Requirements

Why it matters

Ephesians extends the Romans Language Package into a book that is doctrinally denser per verse than Romans — the core passage (2:1-10) alone compresses five near-synonym salvation terms into ten verses, while chapters 1, 4, and 5 concentrate the New Testament’s highest density of “unity”/“one body” language directly against Kannada’s forbidden Veerashaiva Aikya term. Getting this Language Package right determines whether Kannada-speaking learners — many from Lingayat, Haridasa-bhakti, or coastal folk-religion backgrounds — receive Ephesians’ picture of grace, union with Christ, and church unity intact, or hear it collapse into merger-of-identity, karmic-merit, or spirit-appeasement categories already present in their religious environment.

Key findings

• 88 total glossary terms now govern Ephesians translation: 37 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, 51 newly coined or newly fenced for this book (predestination, redemption, mystery, unity, fullness, headship, household-code vocabulary, spiritual-warfare taxonomy, and the core passage’s grace/works vocabulary cluster).
• 59 of those 88 terms (67%) are Critical or High risk (18 Critical, 41 High) — a higher proportion than the Romans baseline, driven by Ephesians’ concentrated theological vocabulary.
• 32 total doctrines are documented in the doctrine risk registry; 26 (12 Critical, 14 High) require mandatory human theologian review — 81% of all doctrines in this curriculum.
• The single highest-severity, book-specific risk is the ಏಕತೆ vs. forbidden ಐಕ್ಯತೆ collision: Ephesians 4:3-6’s sevenfold “one body, one Spirit… one Lord, one faith” is the densest “oneness” passage in the New Testament, sitting directly on top of the Veerashaiva shatsthala path’s final merger-of-identity term already forbidden in the Romans baseline for “salvation.”
• Ephesians introduces structurally new collision types not present in Romans: a direction-of-disclosure inversion (ರಹಸ್ಯ/“mystery,” which in Kannada default usage names esoteric initiate-only teaching, the opposite of Paul’s now-openly-proclaimed sense) and a devotional-title collision (ದಾಸ/“bondservant,” the honored Haridasa poet-saints’ self-chosen title, now required for Ephesians 6:5-8’s pastoral address to actual slave status).

Risks

• ಐಕ್ಯತೆ leakage in any of the four “unity” occurrences (2:14-16; 4:3-4, 4:13, 4:16) would invert the doctrine from distinct-persons-in-unity to merged-loss-of-identity — the pipeline’s single highest-consequence single-word failure mode in this book.
• Bare ರಹಸ್ಯ (mystery) without the mandatory ದೇವರು ಪ್ರಕಟಿಸಿದ qualifying phrase, at any of seven occurrences, silently reverses Paul’s argument from “now openly revealed to all” to “esoteric teaching for initiates.”
• ಕರ್ಮಗಳು substitution for “works”/“good works” in the core passage’s climactic 2:9-10 would make the verse teach against karmic law rather than against human effort — plausibly reinforcing, rather than dismantling, the very framework Paul excludes.
• 5:18’s “filled with the Spirit” carries the highest single-segment folk-religion collision risk in the book, given coastal Karnataka’s active bhūta kōla/daivaradhane spirit-possession and trance practice.
• Household code segments (5:21-6:9) risk losing their governing mutual-submission and Christ-church rationale if excerpted for teaching without their surrounding frame, and 6:5-8’s ದಾಸರು risks being heard as devotional aspiration rather than pastoral address to actual social status.

Opportunities

• Ephesians 2:11-22’s “dividing wall” imagery offers a genuine, groundable point of cultural resonance with Karnataka’s own history of caste-based spatial exclusion and the Lingayat reform movement’s historic rejection of such barriers — usable to illuminate the text powerfully, provided Christ’s cross remains the explicit stated ground rather than a borrowed generic equality ethic.
• Ephesians 2:18’s “access” language is a similarly positive resonance point: undivided, equal access to God for all believers, contrasted instructively with historically caste-restricted ritual temple access.
• The letter’s unusually warm, relational, familial register (adoption, “Abba”-adjacent sonship, marriage-as-picture-of-Christ-and-the-church) gives this curriculum strong pastoral resource potential once the fencing rules below are applied.

Recommended actions

1. Ratify translation_memory.json v2 (88 terms) and treat Ephesians 2:1-10, 4:3-6, and the four “mystery” occurrences as indivisible QA units, not segment-by-segment translations.
2. Load 12_ai_translation_requirements.md (Ephesians) alongside the Romans baseline for every Phase 2 session; its forbidden-substitution list and escalation rules are additive, not replacements.
3. Route all 26 Critical/High doctrines (100% of Critical and High tiers) to mandatory human theologian review per doctrine_risk_registry.json; route the remaining 4 Medium doctrines to native speaker review and 2 Low doctrines to automated review only.
4. Prioritize theologian review capacity toward chapters 1, 2, and 5 — the three highest Critical-tier-density chapters in the book.
5. Build a dedicated back-translation checkpoint specifically verifying ಏಕತೆ (never ಐಕ್ಯತೆ) and the fixed mystery phrase at every occurrence before any Ephesians Phase 2 output is marked reviewed.