Executive Summary: 1 Corinthians — English → Kurdish Language Package

Why it matters

1 Corinthians brings the Kurdish-language Bible translation pipeline into its highest-density collision zone yet. Building on the Romans baseline’s already-Critical risks (salvation/rizgarî’s nationalist-liberation overlap, resurrection/rabûn’s Sunni crucifixion-denial and Yazidi reincarnation risks, sonship and lordship of Christ), this book adds an entirely new tier of exposure: the cross as a concrete historical event (1-2, 15), two brand-new sacramental doctrines with zero prior baseline precedent (baptism, the Lord’s Supper), a chapter (13) whose single controlling word — “Evîn,” love — is the single richest and most emotionally loaded term in all of Kurdish literature, and a worship-order passage (11, 14) landing in the most politically charged contemporary gender-discourse environment of any language in this pipeline (Rojava-era Kurdish women’s-movement rhetoric). Getting Phase 2 translation routing right on this book determines whether Kurdish-speaking believers receive a faithful, doctrinally precise curriculum or one that silently drifts into Sufi mysticism, Islamic legal categories, or Kurdish nationalist politics at exactly its highest-stakes verses.

Key findings

• 36 doctrines identified, of which 16 are Critical-risk and 15 are High-risk (31 total requiring mandatory human theologian review) — only 3 Medium (native speaker review) and 2 Low (automated review). This is a markedly higher theologian-review burden than the Romans baseline proportionally, driven by 1 Corinthians’ concentration of sacramental and practical-ethics material.
• 92 terms recorded in assets/translation_memory.json (35 inherited from the Romans baseline, exactly reused, plus 57 new terms this book introduces): 24 Critical and 32 High risk (56 terms total requiring absolute or near-absolute enforcement and theologian-level scrutiny), 25 Medium, 11 Low.
• The core passage (1 Corinthians 15:1-11) is the single densest concentration of Critical-tier doctrine in the entire curriculum library: Resurrection of Christ, Apostolic Tradition/Gospel Transmission, Salvation, Faith, Grace, and Apostleship all converge in eleven verses.
• Three genuinely new sacramental terms (Şîva Xudan/Lord’s Supper, Imad/baptism, Beşdarî/sacramental participation) have no antecedent anywhere in the Romans baseline and had to be newly coined or adapted for this curriculum.
• “Evîn” (love, ch.13) is assessed as the single highest-stakes lexical choice in the whole book: it is the central word of Kurdish Sufi mystical poetry and the national romantic epic Mem û Zîn, meaning every occurrence must be actively refilled with Paul’s self-giving, non-romantic content.

Risks

• Critical, unresolved-by-vocabulary-alone risks: the cross and resurrection (Qur’anic crucifixion-denial, 4:157) collide directly and repeatedly (ch.1-2, 15); church discipline for sexual immorality (“zîna”) intersects live regional hudud legal categories and honor-killing (“namûs”) frameworks; idol meat maps almost exactly onto lived halal/haram dietary law; baptism collides with Islamic ritual ablution (wudu/ghusl); tongues risks assimilation into Sufi dhikr ecstatic practice.
• Politically live risk: 14:34-35’s instruction on women’s speech in worship, and 11:2-16’s head-covering/headship material, land in a Kurdish reception environment shaped by contemporary Rojava-era women’s-movement rhetoric (YPJ) — requiring non-reactionary theologian framing in either interpretive direction, not resolution in translation.
• Compounding baseline risk: “Rizgarî” (salvation) and “Padîşahiya Xwedê” (Kingdom of God) each recur multiple additional times in this book (1:18,21; 4:20; 6:9-10; 9:22; 15:2,24-25,50), multiplying the baseline’s nationalist-political anchoring burden rather than introducing a new risk category.
• Ambiguity risk requiring mandatory flagging, not resolution: 11:29’s “discerning the body” is genuinely ambiguous even in Greek scholarship; the AI must never silently resolve it.

Opportunities

• Kurdish’s native, non-Arabic-loanword vocabulary assets (Mizgînî, Xwedê, Bav) carry forward unchanged and remain genuine strengths for this book, as does aştî’s (peace) positive resonance with real regional peace processes, now extended to 14:33’s worship-order context.
• The region’s ancient Assyrian/Chaldean/Syriac Christian liturgical heritage offers a real explanatory resource for the Lord’s Supper — a doctrine with no mainstream Islamic ritual parallel but a genuine, if underused, local Christian precedent to draw on.
• 15:10’s grace narrative (Paul, persecutor-turned-apostle) is an unusually strong built-in teaching anchor against the Sufi “keramet” elite-favor default, more vivid and personal than any parallel passage in Romans.
• Cheek-kissing as an existing regional same-gender greeting custom gives 16:20’s “holy kiss” unusually strong natural cultural fit, requiring only a light contextual clarification rather than translation difficulty.

Recommended actions

1. Route 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 for first-priority human theologian review in every translated document, ahead of all other segments, given its unmatched Critical-doctrine density.
2. Merge assets/translation_memory.json (v1, 92 terms) into the Phase 2 enforcement pipeline alongside the unmodified Romans baseline translation_memory.json; never allow the two to silently diverge.
3. Apply the extended forbidden-substitution list in analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md v2.9 for all ch.1-2, 5-7, 8, 10-14, and 15 segments before any translation is marked approved.
4. Flag ch.11 (headship, head covering) and 14:34-35 (women’s silence) for mandatory theologian review with explicit instruction to render literally and not resolve the interpretive question in translation.
5. Prioritize native-speaker sign-off on ch.13’s love vocabulary at the clause level (13:4-7), not merely the single-word level, given “Evîn’s” uniquely high risk of romantic/mystical misreading.
6. Confirm the “1 Korîntî” citation convention with the destination platform before batch processing, consistent with the baseline’s own confirmation requirement for “Romayî.”