Executive Summary — Acts 1–28 Translation Requirements (English → Korean)

Curriculum: Acts 1–28 · Core passage: Acts 2:1–41 (Pentecost) · Language pair: English → Korean · Builds on: Romans Language Package (baseline)

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Why it matters

Acts is the highest-density collision point in this pipeline between the biblical text and living Korean religious practice. Where Romans mainly guarded doctrinal vocabulary (grace, righteousness, salvation) against a self-critical Korean church tradition’s own recognized risk (기복신앙, “blessing-seeking faith”), Acts narrates the events themselves — tongues, spirit-filling, healing “in the name of Jesus,” exorcism, communal property-sharing, and an early self-designation (“the Way,” 도) — that sit directly on top of active Korean shamanism (무속신앙), Korean charismatic church practice, Confucian ethics, and even modern Korean political memory (national division, collectivization). Getting Acts right in Korean is not a vocabulary-gap problem, as it was in less-Christianized pipeline languages; it is a precision-and-boundary problem in an already fluent theological language.

Key findings

• 36 doctrines cataloged across the full book (doctrine_risk_registry.json): 16 Critical, 18 High, 2 Medium, 0 Low — 34 require mandatory human theologian review, 2 require native speaker review, 0 are automated-only. This is a markedly higher theologian-review burden than a typical curriculum, reflecting Acts’ narrative concentration of Spirit, miracle, and conversion material.
• 123 terms now populate the Acts translation memory: 45 inherited verbatim from the Romans baseline (Critical: 12, High: 16, Medium: 9, Low: 8) plus 78 new Acts-specific terms (Critical: 13, High: 17, Medium: 25, Low: 23). Combined, the Acts term base carries 25 Critical-risk terms and 33 High-risk terms — 58 terms requiring the highest enforcement tier before any segment is accepted.
• The single highest-risk term in the entire curriculum is “the Way” (도) — Korea’s own Confucian, Buddhist, and new-religious-movement vocabulary for a self-cultivation path — which Acts itself adopts as the church’s earliest self-designation and which must never appear unglossed.
• The single highest-risk doctrine cluster is the Holy Spirit and Pentecost (the core passage itself), where 방언 (tongues), 성령 충만 (Spirit-filling), and 능력/기사/표적 (power/wonders/signs) all sit adjacent to shamanistic trance-speech, spirit-possession (신들림), and mudang ritual-power claims respectively.
• One entirely new Korea-specific risk with no Romans-era precedent: “all things in common” (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32–35) collides with modern Korean political memory of national division and North Korean collectivization, requiring a dedicated forbidden-substitution rule absent from any prior language package in this pipeline.

Risks

• Syncretistic drift, not doctrinal contradiction, is the dominant failure mode. Korean Protestantism’s century-plus of settled vocabulary means the risk is rarely “no word exists” — it is existing words being pulled toward shamanistic, Confucian, or political neighbors already active in Korean cultural life (무속신앙, 제사, 기복신앙, 공산주의, 참회/반성, 저승, 팔자/운명).
• Cross-document inconsistency risk is Critical-tier at two exact points: Acts 13:38–39 (justification apart from the law) and Acts 15:11 (salvation by grace) must match the Romans translation memory word-for-word; any drift creates an internal contradiction across the curriculum library, not just a translation quality issue.
• Occult-confrontation passages (Acts 8, 13, 16, 19) carry real pastoral stakes: softening 마술 or 점하는 귀신 into neutral “spiritual power” language would blunt Scripture’s own explicit verdict against practices — 점/무당 consultation for payment — that remain live in Korean folk life today.
• Korean charismatic church culture itself is a named risk factor in multiple doctrine notes (안수, 방언, 권능과 기사와 표적, 은사), meaning even sincere, orthodox Korean Christian readers may import devotional-practice assumptions that need explicit disambiguation from Acts’ historical narrative claims.

Opportunities

• Korea’s uniquely deep, indigenous Bible translation tradition (Korean Revised Version lineage, settled since the 1880s–1900s) means almost no new coinage is required — the work is disambiguation and fencing, not vocabulary invention, unlike most languages in this pipeline.
• Acts 8 (Simon Magus), Acts 16 (the python spirit), and Acts 19 (magic books burned) supply the curriculum’s own strongest, most concrete teaching material against exactly the shamanistic transactional patterns Korean church leaders already self-critique — a built-in pastoral asset, not just a risk to manage.
• Korea’s status as a leading missionary-sending nation gives “to the end of the earth” and “preaching unhindered” (Great Commission Fulfilled) genuine resonance, provided the curriculum steers this toward gospel motivation rather than the success-metrics culture some Korean leaders have flagged.

Recommended actions

1. Lock Acts 13:38–39 and 15:11 to the Romans translation memory’s exact wording before any Phase 2 segment translation begins; treat as a pre-flight validation gate, not a post-hoc review item.
2. Mandate the “그 도, 곧 그리스도의 도” gloss and the real-known-language 방언 qualifier as non-optional, validation-blocking requirements at every occurrence — do not rely on translator judgment.
3. Add the “all things in common” / 공산주의-avoidance rule as a first-class forbidden-substitution category in Phase 2 tooling, since it has no Romans-package precedent to inherit from.
4. Route all 34 theologian-review doctrines and all Critical/High-risk terms (58 combined) through mandatory human theologian sign-off before Phase 2 output is considered final; native-speaker review suffices only for the 2 Medium-tier doctrines (church leadership/governance; Great Commission Fulfilled) and Low-tier lexical items.

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Sources: assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md, analysis/08_core_glossary.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, analysis/05_translation_landscape.md, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md.