Executive Summary: Acts 1–28 (English → Kashmiri)

Why it matters

The Acts curriculum extends the existing Kashmiri Romans Language Package into the book that narrates the Spirit’s outpouring, the church’s birth, and the Gospel’s first movement from Jerusalem to Rome — precisely the territory where Kashmir’s dual religious landscape (a Sunni Muslim majority shaped by Tawhid doctrine and the Rishi Sufi order, plus a smaller Kashmiri Pandit Hindu minority carrying Kashmir Shaivism) generates its sharpest collisions. Acts concentrates more Critical-risk doctrine, at higher repetition frequency, than Romans did: the crucifixion is restated as historical fact across nearly every apostolic sermon, “apostle” recurs dozens of times naming a sustained office rather than an occasional reference, and Acts 2:38 introduces a single verse (repentance + baptism + forgiveness + the gift of the Spirit) that concentrates four Critical doctrines at once. Getting this Language Package right is the difference between a curriculum that teaches the actual content of Acts and one whose Kashmiri vocabulary quietly imports mainstream Islamic deeds-weighing soteriology or Kashmir Shaivite self-recognition philosophy underneath biblical-sounding words.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage complete. All 28 chapters of Acts were analyzed; every chapter contributes either new load-bearing vocabulary or is explicitly logged as reviewed-with-no-new-terms (chapters 18, 22, 25, 27).
• 84 total glossary terms now govern Phase 2 translation: 37 reused exactly from the Romans baseline, 47 newly introduced by Acts. Combined risk distribution: 22 Critical, 26 High, 22 Medium, 14 Low — meaning 48 of 84 terms (57%) require human theologian-level scrutiny before deployment.
• 21 doctrines are tracked in the doctrine risk registry: 9 Critical, 7 High, 4 Medium, 1 Low. 16 of 21 doctrines (76%) require human theologian review; 4 require native speaker review; 1 (Cultural Continuity and Jewish Practice) is automated-only.
• apostle (رسول) risk was elevated from the Romans baseline’s tier to Critical for this curriculum specifically, because Acts names “the apostles” and Paul’s own apostleship dozens of times across a sustained narrative, multiplying exposure to the Muhammad’s-title collision risk far beyond Romans’ sparser usage.
• Acts 2:38 (repentance, baptism, forgiveness, the gift of the Spirit) is the single highest-risk verse in the curriculum — more theologically dense, and far more likely to be quoted, memorized, and repeated outside full teaching context, than any comparable verse in Romans.
• Two brand-new collision categories not present in Romans now require dedicated handling: repentance/توبہ vocabulary (a precise, major Islamic soteriological term) and idol/polytheism vocabulary (بُت/دیوتا), which requires opposite-direction fencing for the two audiences within the very same passages (Acts 14, 17).

Risks

• Doctrinal drift on “apostle” across 28 chapters. A single early fencing note is unlikely to survive sustained reader attention across the whole book; every occurrence needs reinforcement, and parallel Phase 2 workers must reconcile this footnote consistently at merge time.
• Silent softening of the crucifixion claim. Because Acts restates “you crucified him” / “they nailed him to the cross” far more often than Romans does (five distinct occurrences: 2:23, 36; 4:10; 5:30; 10:39; 13:28-29), each repetition is a fresh opportunity for translation pressure to soften it toward “he suffered,” directly undercutting the apologetic against the mainstream Sunni reading of Quran 4:157.
• “Witness” (گواہ) sliding into “martyr” (شہید). Luke’s own literary structure intentionally shifts the word’s sense from eyewitness (ch. 1-2) toward willing death for testimony (ch. 7, 22); Kashmiri readers have a strong, politically live alternative word ready at hand, and any lapse would import unwanted regional-political freight.
• Two-directional idol/polytheism risk. بُت (idol) risks over-application into a blanket anti-Hindu-Pandit polemic for Muslim-background readers, while Pandit-background readers may rightly object if Trika’s non-iconic philosophical monism is treated as identical to Lystra’s crowd-polytheism; this is the curriculum’s clearest ambiguity requiring separate handling for each audience within a single passage (17:16-31).
• “Kingdom of God” as a structural inclusio (1:6; 28:31) against Kashmir’s contested-sovereignty history. An unfenced occurrence at either bracketing point compromises the reading of the whole book, not just one passage.

Opportunities

• Genuine points of contact, not only collision, are documented and should be used pastorally: خدمت (service, khidmat-e-khalq) is a positive shared ethical category; شکر (thanksgiving) resonates warmly with Islamic gratitude devotion; نذر (vow) and قرعہ (casting lots, bounded by prayer) are low-risk cultural bridges; ظلم (persecution/grave injustice) is a term of genuine moral weight in both traditions.
• Every mother tongue’s dignity (Acts 2:6,8) offers a gentle counterpoint to assumptions that revelation requires a single sacred language, worth surfacing pastorally rather than treating only as a translation footnote.
• Acts 17’s Areopagus method is a reusable teaching model for respectful, precise cross-tradition engagement with both audiences, provided the curriculum preserves Paul’s rapid movement from common ground to specific, non-negotiable claims.

Recommended actions

1. Load translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json (Acts versions) before any Phase 2 segment translation, per the pre-flight checklist in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
2. Route all 22 Critical-term and 9 Critical-doctrine segments to human theologian review before deployment, with Acts 2:36, 2:38, 13:38-39, and 16:31 fixed as fully verbatim, cross-document-consistent thesis verses.
3. Reinforce the رسول (apostle) Muhammad-distinguishing fence at every occurrence, not only at first use, and build this into parallel-worker reconciliation at merge time.
4. Commission native-speaker confirmation of provisional idiom renderings (e.g., “cut to the heart,” دِلَس منز چھِد لگُن) before wide deployment, consistent with the baseline’s caution that several Kashmiri renderings remain provisional pending review by a Kashmiri-speaking theologian familiar with both the Islamic and Kashmir Shaivite religious landscape.
5. Apply audience-separated fencing notes at Acts 14 and 17 so that idol/polytheism language is never taught as a single undifferentiated critique of “Hindu belief” but precisely targets crafted cult-images and crowd-polytheism, distinct from Trika’s own philosophical monism.