Executive Summary: 1 Corinthians Translation Requirements (English → Korean)

Why it matters

Korean is the most translation-ready language in this pipeline — over a century of indigenous Bible translation has already produced settled, community-recognized vocabulary for nearly every doctrine in 1 Corinthians. But that same maturity conceals the pipeline’s sharpest syncretism risk: this letter’s own content (idol meat, the Lord’s Supper as a memorial meal, resurrection appearances, church discipline, headship) collides more directly with live Korean cultural-religious practice — Confucian ancestor-memorial rites (제사, jesa), shamanistic ritual (무속신앙), and Confucian household-authority norms — than almost any other New Testament book could. Getting the vocabulary right is not the hard part; getting the doctrinal differentiation right, verse by verse, against practices many Korean believers’ own families still perform, is.

Key findings

• 22 doctrines identified across all 16 chapters (full-book coverage confirmed, no chapter silently skipped): 6 Critical, 13 High, 1 Medium, 2 Low — 19 of 22 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review.
• Approximately 96 terms registered in the curriculum’s translation_memory.json: 26 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline package, ~70 newly introduced by 1 Corinthians. Of these, 49 terms carry Critical or High risk (17 inherited, 32 new) — nearly half the total glossary.
• Six Critical-risk terms are new to this book: food sacrificed to idols (εἰδωλόθυτα), the table of the Lord, the Lord’s Supper, love (ἀγάπη), the resurrection-appearance verb (ὤφθη), and “died for our sins.” Each maps onto a specific, well-documented Korean cultural collision point rather than a generic translation risk.
• One baseline term is deliberately elevated: “resurrection” (부활) moves from Medium (in Romans) to Critical for this curriculum, since chapter 15 makes it the book’s central doctrine and the core passage’s theological anchor.
• Korea’s existing Bible-translation strength means the task here is narrower and more surgical than in most pipeline languages: defending already-settled vocabulary against specific, named syncretism pulls, not building theological vocabulary from scratch.

Risks

1. Idol meat / jesa collision (Critical, chs. 8, 10) — Korean has no neutral word for “food ritually offered then eaten” because the only live cultural referent (jesa) is itself the target of the teaching; historical martyrdom precedent (1801, 1866 persecutions) raises the pastoral stakes further.
2. Lord’s Supper / jesa memorial-meal collision (Critical, ch. 11) — a structural, not lexical, resemblance that no word choice alone can resolve; requires differentiation at every single occurrence, not just the first.
3. Resurrection appearances vs. ancestor-spirit visitation claims (Critical, 15:5-8) — underlies the entire eyewitness argument of the core passage; an under-glossed 보이시다 risks compatibility with folk-shamanistic apparition claims.
4. Love (ἀγάπη) vs. 정 (jeong) (Critical, ch. 13) — a genuine lexical gap, not a crowded-neighborhood problem; Korean has no single word for willed, commanded, unconditional love as distinct from accumulated relational attachment.
5. Grace at 15:10 vs. achievement-culture merit-synergism (Critical) — Paul’s “I worked harder than all of them” is the single sentence most likely to be misread as grace-plus-merit in a status-and-effort-conscious culture.
6. 신령한 (spiritual) one syllable from the baseline-forbidden 신령 (Critical/High, chs. 2, 12, 15) — established KRV vocabulary that cannot be replaced, occurring at unusually high frequency in this book, requiring a mandatory same-occurrence gloss every time.

Opportunities

• 그리스도의 몸 (body of Christ, ch. 12) positively counters, rather than reinforces, the baseline’s documented risk of over-reading unity through Korea’s ethnic-nationalist 단일민족 or blood-lineage framing — a rare case where this book’s own doctrine corrects a pre-existing risk rather than adding one.
• 아빠/appa (Romans baseline) and 마라나타/Maranatha (this book) both benefit from unusually natural transliteration fits between Aramaic intimacy/invocation forms and existing Korean usage.
• Korea’s settled, indigenous KRV vocabulary tradition means Phase 2 translation work can proceed with high confidence in existing terms; the primary Phase 2 effort should go toward footnote/teaching-layer discipline (jesa differentiation, agapē anchoring) rather than term invention.

Recommended actions

1. Load both the baseline Romans and this curriculum’s translation_memory.json for every Phase 2 segment; enforce the Critical/High forbidden-substitution lists in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md without exception.
2. Route all 19 theologian-review doctrines and all 49 Critical/High terms through mandatory human review before Phase 2 sign-off; do not permit automated-only clearance for any segment touching idol meat, the Lord’s Supper, resurrection appearances, love, or grace.
3. Require the mandatory jesa-differentiation footnote at every occurrence (not just first occurrence) of εἰδωλόθυτα, δεῖπνον κυριακόν, ἀνάμνησις, and τράπεζα/ποτήριον κυρίου, per the escalation rules in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
4. Anchor every ch. 13 love-related segment to the chapter’s own 13:4-7 behavioral definition rather than relying on default 사랑 connotations, to compensate for the documented lexical gap versus 정.
5. Carry the resurrection-doctrine risk elevation (Medium → Critical) forward consistently into all Phase 2 outputs and reviewer routing for this curriculum.