Executive Summary: 3 John — English → Korean Translation Requirements

Why it matters

3 John is a 14-verse personal letter, but it is disproportionately high-risk for Korean-destination translation: nearly every verse touches vocabulary with a documented, named collision against either Korean shamanistic folk practice (기복신앙, 무속신앙) or Korean church-culture patterns (Presbyterian elder-office assumptions, megachurch authoritarian-leadership controversies). Korean is the best-positioned language in this pipeline overall — over a century of settled, indigenous Bible-translation vocabulary means almost no term is genuinely missing — but that same maturity means several terms sit in crowded semantic neighborhoods shared with non-Christian frames, requiring active doctrinal fencing rather than passive reliance on existing usage. Getting this short book right protects learners from importing prosperity-gospel and authoritarian-leadership distortions into a text that actually argues against both.

Key findings

• 1:2 is the single highest-priority risk in the entire book. “Prosper… just as your soul prospers” is the direct, historically documented proof text for Korea’s “threefold blessing” (삼박자 축복) prosperity teaching, associated with a major Korean megachurch movement and long debated within Korean Protestantism itself as edging toward 기복신앙 — the same shamanistic-transactional pattern already flagged Critical for “grace” in the Romans baseline package.
• No vocabulary gaps; several crowded neighborhoods. Unlike most languages in this pipeline, 3 John requires zero new coinages — every Greek concept already has a mature Korean Bible-translation lexeme. The work is fencing (footnoting), not invention: 진리 (truth) vs. Buddhist 사성제; 영혼 (soul) vs. shamanistic 혼/넋; 본받다 (imitate) vs. Confucian/Buddhist rank-based master-imitation; 쫓아내다 (cast out) vs. exorcism idiom; 장로 (elder) vs. the modern Korean Presbyterian elected office.
• Diotrephes (1:9-10) resonates uncomfortably with live Korean church controversy. Documented, publicly debated authoritarian senior-pastor and pulpit-succession disputes at several of Korea’s largest congregations make this the letter’s most culturally sensitive passage; it must be taught as a named sin, not a leadership style excused by hierarchical deference norms.
• Full-book coverage confirmed complete. 3 John has exactly one chapter; the core passage (1:1-14) and the full book are identical, and every verse has been mapped, analyzed, and risk-tiered with none silently omitted.

Risks

Tier	Doctrine-level count	Term-level count	Review routing
Critical	1 (Prosperity, Health, and the Soul’s Well-Being)	3 (하나님 reused; 형통하다 new; counted per core glossary)	Human theologian, every occurrence
High	6 (Hospitality to Traveling Ministers; Imitating Good rather than Evil; Church Leadership and Pride/Diotrephes; Commendation of Faithful Witness/Demetrius; Truth and Christian Fellowship; Apostolic Self-Designation/“The Elder”)	11	Human theologian
Medium	0 (doctrine level; term-level Medium risks exist and route to native speaker review)	16	Native speaker review
Low	1 (Epistolary Greeting and Closing Fellowship)	15	Automated review sufficient

Total requiring mandatory human theologian review: 7 of 8 doctrines (all Critical + all High). No doctrine in this book routes to native-speaker-only review — a notably higher escalation rate than typical for this pipeline, reflecting how densely 3 John’s short text packs high-collision vocabulary.

Opportunities

• Korean’s existing settled vocabulary (진리, 교제, 동역자, 성도) means Phase 2 translation can proceed largely by enforcement and footnoting rather than by building new theological Korean from scratch — a lighter linguistic lift than most languages in this pipeline, even though the doctrinal-risk lift is unusually heavy.
• 3 John’s warm, personal register (아빠/appa-style intimacy already established for Romans 8:15) gives this book a natural opportunity to model gospel-motivated hospitality and church-community warmth in a culturally resonant way, provided the hospitality vocabulary (나그네, 전송하다) is taught as gospel-partnership rather than flattened to generic Korean guest-courtesy.
• Demetrius’s positive commendation (1:12) offers a constructive counter-model to Diotrephes, useful for Korean church-leadership teaching contexts seeking a positive vocabulary of faithful, humble, truth-consistent character alongside the necessary critique of prideful leadership.

Recommended actions

1. Load both the Romans baseline translation_memory.json and the new 3 John assets/translation_memory.json together for every Phase 2 segment; never process 3 John material against the 3 John file alone, since 하나님, 교회, and 이방인 are shared, baseline-governed terms.
2. Apply mandatory theologian review and a fixed teaching footnote to every occurrence of 3 John 1:2, regardless of which of the five named curriculum doctrines a given lesson is built around — this is a standing rule, not a one-time check.
3. Require the disambiguating footnotes specified in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md (장로 at 1:1; 이방인 and 그 이름 at 1:7; 쫓아내다 at 1:10; 본받다 at 1:11) at first occurrence in every lesson document.
4. Route all Diotrephes-related material (1:9-10) through theologian review with explicit attention to Korean church-culture sensitivities, ensuring the text’s critique lands on prideful conduct, not on the concept of church leadership or the office of 장로/담임목사 itself.
5. Carry forward the Romans baseline’s honorific-grammar and forbidden-substitution rules unchanged; this book adds to, but never relaxes, those requirements.