Linguistic Gap Analysis: 2 Corinthians 1–13 (English → Kurdish)

Purpose and Scope

This analysis identifies where Kurmanji Kurdish (Latin script, Hawar alphabet) has, lacks, or over-supplies vocabulary for the eight core doctrines of the 2 Corinthians curriculum, building directly on analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md and analysis/08_core_glossary.md, and extending the baseline Romans translation_memory.json / bible_term_registry.json without contradicting them. Coverage spans the full letter, chapters 1–13, with the core passage (5:11–21) as the theological anchor. All established baseline renderings (Xwedê, Îsa, Xudan, Mesîh, Ruhê Pîroz, Rizgarî, Adalet, Guneh, Kerem, Îman, Pîroz, Pîrozan, Teqdîs, Şerîeta Mûsa, Peyman, etc.) are reused exactly and are not re-litigated here except where 2 Corinthians introduces a new sense or a new collision.

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1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

For each of the eight curriculum doctrines: available Kurdish terms, their weaknesses, and the recommended strategy.

1.1 Reconciliation with God

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Lihevanîn (reconciliation)	Kurdish tribal/aşîret reconciliation (also called aştîbûn) is a mediated settlement between two roughly equal offended parties, brokered by elders, involving mutual concession. Paul’s katallagē is God’s own, unilateral, non-negotiated initiative toward the offending party (humanity), accomplished entirely at God’s cost through Christ.	Retain Lihevanîn as the base term (no better native alternative exists), but mandate a fixed accompanying clause at every occurrence in teaching material: “God himself began this reconciliation, not us” (Xwedê bi xwe ev lihevanîn destpê kir, ne em). Never let the term stand alone in a first exposure.
Aştîkirin (peace-making)	Collapses the reconciling act into the resulting state of peace; already reserved for Aştî (peace, baseline). Using it here would blur reconciliation (event) and peace (status) into one word, weakening the argument of 5:18-21 which turns on a decisive completed act.	Rejected as primary term; may appear only in loose paraphrase, never in the technical gloss.
Bi Xwedê re bêne lihevanîn (be reconciled to God, passive)	Kurmanji does not have as strong a grammaticalized true passive as Greek; risk of translators defaulting to an active reflexive (“xwe lihev bînin,” reconcile yourselves), which reverses Paul’s initiator logic.	Passive/receptive construction is mandatory (already fixed in translation memory as Critical/High). Any active-reflexive rendering must be flagged and rejected at QA.

Doctrine-level recommendation: Treat “reconciliation” as a fenced High-risk cluster (Lihevanîn / Peyama Lihevanînê / Bi Xwedê re bêne lihevanîn) requiring the tribal-reconciliation contrast to be taught explicitly every time, not merely translated once and assumed to carry.

1.2 New Creation in Christ

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Afirandina Nû (new creation, from afirandin, to create)	No true native Kurdish word exists for creation ex nihilo distinct from ordinary “making” (çêkirin/avakirin); “afirandin” is the standard borrowed-into-Kurdish theological word already used for Genesis creation, so it is doctrinally sound, but it must compete against two live regional frameworks: (1) Sufi fana/baqa — self-annihilation and mystical rebirth in the divine; (2) Yazidi cyclical soul-renewal ideas adjacent to kiras guhertin. Both frameworks are cyclical/repeatable; Paul’s new creation is a one-time, definitive, non-repeatable status change.	Use Afirandina Nû but pair it consistently with di Mesîh de (in Christ) so the phrase never floats free as generic “spiritual renewal.” Teaching notes must state explicitly: “once, not cyclical; a legal-relational status, not a mystical state.”
Veguherîn (transformed, ch. 3:18)	Shares surface root-feel with Yazidi “kiras guhertin” (changing shirts/garments = reincarnation doctrine) even though it is a different lexical item; hearers steeped in that folk-idiom may still associate “changing” language with body-change across lives.	Retain Veguherîn (no safer alternative exists) but anchor firmly: single ongoing Spirit-wrought transformation within one life, into Christ’s moral likeness, never a change between bodies/lives.
di Mesîh de (in Christ)	Risk of assimilation into Sufi wahdat al-wujud (“unity of being”) — the idea that the self is mystically absorbed into or identical with the divine. Paul’s “in Christ” is real, permanent union while preserving personal, creaturely distinctness from Christ.	Retain literal preposition phrase (no viable substitute); every first occurrence in a lesson should carry a brief clarifying gloss distinguishing covenantal union from ontological absorption.

Doctrine-level recommendation: High risk, driven by directional ambiguity (over-assimilation into existing mystical frameworks) rather than rejection, the inverse of the more typical Islamic-denial pattern seen in Christology terms. Needs explicit both-directions teaching, mirroring the Sonship/Incarnation approach already established in the baseline.

1.3 Suffering and Comfort in Ministry

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Tengasî (affliction/tribulation)	Extremely well-supplied vocabulary field, given lived Kurdish political history (displacement, persecution, war) across four states — genuinely an asset, not a gap. Risk runs the other direction: the term is too resonant with ethnic-political suffering and may default there instead of to suffering specifically for Christ’s sake in ministry.	Use Tengasî but always qualify with ministry/gospel framing (“ji ber Mizgîniyê” — for the gospel’s sake) to keep the referent Christ-centered, not generic ethnic suffering.
Teselî (comfort/consolation)	No shortage of native comfort vocabulary; minor risk that it reads as passive emotional soothing or stoic resignation (a value also present in regional culture) rather than God’s active, personal, repeated ministry of comfort that is then passed on to others (1:3-7).	Retain Teselî; ensure surrounding verbs keep God as active giver (“Xwedê teselî dide,” God gives comfort), not a state that simply descends.
mirina Îsa (the death/dying of Jesus, 4:10)	Risk of being misread as a claim of repeated or ongoing atoning death rather than Paul’s participatory identification with Christ’s death in ministry suffering.	Retain literal phrase but require explicit participatory framing (“em di xizmeta xwe de bi mirina Îsa re yek dibin” — we are united with the death of Jesus in our ministry), distinguishing once-for-all atonement from ongoing ministerial participation.

Doctrine-level recommendation: Medium/High. Vocabulary supply is genuinely strong (a positive asset unusual in this project); the risk is directional drift toward political-suffering readings rather than absence of terms.

1.4 The New Covenant versus the Old

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Peymana Nû (new covenant)	Direct, high-stakes collision with regional Islamic naskh (abrogation) doctrine, in which later revelation supersedes and nullifies earlier revelation as corrected/outdated. Paul’s argument in ch. 3 is not “correction of an error” but a covenant of a fundamentally different kind (Spirit vs. letter, life vs. condemnation).	Retain Peymana Nû (baseline-consistent root); mandatory theologian framing note at every occurrence distinguishing “different in kind” from “corrects an error in the earlier one.”
Nivîs (letter/written code)	Read alone, could sound like a generic literacy/writing metaphor rather than the technical Pauline “letter that kills” contrast.	Never allow Nivîs to appear without its paired antonym Ruh (lowercase) in the same sentence or immediate context, preserving the kills/gives-life polarity.
Ruh (lowercase, life-giving spirit-principle) vs. Ruhê Pîroz (capitalized, Holy Spirit)	Kurmanji orthography does not mark case distinction as forcefully as English capitalization; the visual distinction between “Ruh” and “Ruhê Pîroz” may be lost in reading aloud or in less careful editions, risking either (a) demoting the Holy Spirit to a common noun, or (b) collapsing Paul’s careful contextual argument (3:6, 17) into a redundant doubling of the same fixed title.	Editorial rule: reserve the bare Ruh for this one contextual argument in ch. 3 only; everywhere else in the curriculum, revert to full baseline Ruhê Pîroz. Flag both usages in ch. 3 for mandatory theologian review so translators do not silently normalize one term across the whole chapter.
Perde (veil)	Ordinary, high-frequency word for women’s religious head-covering in contemporary Kurdish usage; a reader could easily (mis)hear 3:13-16 as a commentary on veiling practice rather than a metaphor for a spiritually obscured mind.	Retain Perde (no safer native alternative); require an explicit metaphor-marking gloss (“perdeyek li ser hiş û dilî” — a veil over the mind and heart) at first occurrence in any lesson.
Azadî (freedom, 3:17)	Sits in the same crowded political-vocabulary neighborhood as baseline Rizgarî (salvation) — both are core vocabulary of the century-long Kurdish statelessness/liberation movement (“Azadî û Rizgariya Kurdistanê” is a familiar political slogan pattern).	Apply the identical anchoring discipline mandated for Rizgarî: never leave Azadî unqualified; always pair with “ji şerîetê” (from the law) or “ji tewra guneh” (from sin’s condemnation) to keep the referent spiritual, not national-political.

Doctrine-level recommendation: Critical. This doctrine carries the single sharpest structural collision in the letter (naskh/abrogation) plus a second, independent Critical-tier political-vocabulary risk (Azadî). Requires the heaviest theologian-review load of any doctrine in this curriculum.

1.5 Sincerity and Apostolic Authority

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Rastdilî (sincerity, lit. “straight/true-heartedness”)	Genuine gap: Kurdish has no single native word that isolates Paul’s specific sense of transparent, non-manipulative ministerial motive as distinct from general honesty. The nearest ready-made theological term available regionally is Arabic-derived ihlas/îxlas, which must be explicitly avoided — it is the title-word of Qur’an Sura 112, the foundational anti-Trinitarian tawhid sura (“He begets not, nor is He begotten”). Importing that root would silently attach an entire polemical anti-Trinity frame to an unrelated pastoral concept.	Use the native compound Rastdilî exclusively; treat any îxlas-rooted alternative as a Critical forbidden substitution, on par with the baseline’s “Namûs” ban for law.
Nûner (ambassador)	A genuine linguistic asset — the modern standard word for a diplomatic representative, prominently used of the Kurdistan Regional Government’s international representative offices (“nûnertî”). Risk: this real-world usage may flatten Paul’s urgent, personal, pleading tone (“we beg you,” 5:20) into a cool bureaucratic-diplomatic register, and/or import unresolved KRG statehood-representation associations into a purely spiritual appeal.	Retain Nûner as the noun, but the verb of appeal accompanying it must retain emotional urgency (e.g., “em bi germî lava dikin” — we plead warmly) rather than a flat diplomatic notice register.
Wîjdan (conscience)	Broadly compatible across regional traditions; low-medium independent risk, but must be tied specifically to Paul’s transparent conduct before God (1:12; 4:2; 5:11), not read as a generic universal ethical faculty detached from that accountability.	Retain; add contextual qualifier “li ber Xwedê” (before God) at first occurrence per lesson.

Doctrine-level recommendation: Critical, driven almost entirely by the sincerity/ikhlas forbidden-substitution risk — a single lexical accident could import Sura 112’s entire anti-Trinitarian argument into unrelated pastoral material.

1.6 Generosity and Grace in Giving

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Kerem (grace, extended to the collection, chs. 8–9)	This is the sharpest doctrinal collision in the entire curriculum. Kurdish-speaking audiences (Sunni Shafi’i majority) live within a religious economy organized around zakat (obligatory, fixed-percentage almsgiving, one of five pillars) and sadaqa (voluntary charity, still framed as meritorious religious duty). Paul’s argument is the near-opposite structure: giving flows freely and joyfully from grace already received, has no fixed quota (8:12, “according to what a person has, not what he does not have”), and is not a means of earning merit or fulfilling a pillar-obligation.	Retain baseline Kerem (no substitute is doctrinally safer, since it must connect back to salvation-grace), but mandate an explicit contrastive teaching note at every occurrence in chs. 8–9: giving here is response, not requirement; no fixed percentage; motivated by what has already been received, not what must be paid.
yê ku bi kefxweşî dide (cheerful giver, 9:7)	Same obligation-contrast risk as above; “cheerful, not under compulsion” is precisely the point of contrast with a quota-based system, and could otherwise be read as simply describing a nice personality trait rather than a structural theological claim.	Retain the descriptive phrase; pair explicitly with the negation “ne ji ber neçarî an mecbûrî” (not from necessity or compulsion) at first occurrence.
dilfirehî (generosity/liberality, ch. 8)	Same Greek lexeme (haplotēs) as ch. 1’s “sincerity,” but a distinct sense in the giving context. Using one fixed English-style gloss for both senses would blur two theologically distinct concepts under one Kurdish word.	Maintain two separate glosses per context: Rastdilî for the sincerity sense (chs. 1–2), dilfirehî for the generosity sense (ch. 8). Flag any drafts that use one term for both.
Wekhevî (equality, 8:13-14)	Could be misheard, in a region with recent exposure to redistributive/socialist political rhetoric (Rojava’s political experiments, leftist Kurdish movements), as endorsing a general economic-equality mandate rather than Paul’s specific point about mutual sufficiency within the church’s giving relationship.	Anchor narrowly to the Jerusalem-collection context: “ne ku her kes wek hev be di her tiştî de, lê ku kes tune nebe” (not that everyone be equal in everything, but that no one be in need).

Doctrine-level recommendation: Critical, the single most religiously load-bearing doctrine in this curriculum given the zakat/sadaqa collision — arguably a sharper and more systemic collision than any single term flagged Critical in the Romans baseline, because it collides with an entire pillar of practice, not just a concept.

1.7 Power in Weakness

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Qelsî (weakness)	Runs directly against the tribal honor-shame culture’s default valuation of visible strength, martial capability, and public honor (namûs/şeref); a text celebrating weakness as the locus of divine power is culturally countercultural in a way that requires active teaching, not just translation. Secondary risk: assimilation into Sufi ascetic self-effacement (fana, ego-death) as a spiritual technique for attainment, which is a human-achieved humility rather than Paul’s point about God’s power operating despite, not through cultivation of, weakness.	Retain Qelsî; every occurrence in the “power made perfect in weakness” cluster (12:1-10) must carry explicit teaching distinguishing (a) Paul’s non-elective, God-imposed weakness from (b) a self-cultivated ascetic virtue.
hêz di qelsiyê de temam dibe (power made perfect in weakness, 12:9)	The letter’s theological center-point; the phrase is linguistically transparent but doctrinally invisible if not explicitly unpacked — a Kurdish reader trained in honor-shame categories may read straight past the paradox rather than register it as paradoxical at all.	Treat as Critical with mandatory explanatory framing in every lesson touching chs. 10-13, not merely a literal translation.
Nîşanên Şandîtiyê (signs of an apostle, 12:12)	Direct collision with the Sufi keramet concept (miracle-signs marking an elevated spiritual master/saint) already flagged Critical for baseline Kerem; here the collision is sharper because the passage explicitly ties the signs to a specific claim of authority.	Teach explicitly as confirming evidence unique to the foundational, unrepeatable apostolic office — not a mark of ongoing spiritual elevation available to modern venerated holy men (pîr figures).
qasidê Şeytan (messenger of Satan, 12:7)	“Milyaket” (angel) must be avoided since mainstream regional angelology (shared Sunni/Yazidi/Yarsani frameworks) generally holds angels incapable of sin/rebellion; using “milyaketê Îblîs” would read as doctrinally contradictory to the audience’s existing angelology.	Use generic qasid (messenger/agent), not “milyaket,” resolving the tension without requiring a full angelology digression.
dîtin û eşkerekirin (visions and revelations, 12:1-7)	Visionary/mystical-experience claims are a live, respected category in regional Sufi kashf (“unveiling”) tradition; a Kurdish reader may expect such claims to be presented as prestige markers, the opposite of Paul’s reluctant, self-deprecating disclosure.	Preserve Paul’s reluctance explicitly in surrounding narration/teaching notes (“ez bi neçarî behs dikim” — I speak of this only unwillingly), not just the vision content itself.

Doctrine-level recommendation: Critical. This is the doctrine most likely to be technically translated correctly while still functionally failing to communicate, because its countercultural logic runs against default honor-shame reading habits rather than against a specific competing doctrine to fence out.

1.8 Genuine versus False Apostleship

Available Kurdish terms	Weaknesses	Recommended strategy
Şandiyên Derew (false apostles)	Parallels but must not be conflated with regional debates over the authenticity of prophetic/messenger claimants generally (a live category in both mainstream and heterodox regional religious discourse); Paul’s concern is narrowly doctrinal fidelity to the one gospel of Christ already delivered, not a general framework for evaluating any religious claimant.	Keep tightly scoped to the Corinthian narrative; avoid generalized “how to test a prophet” framing that could be read as commentary on other religious traditions’ prophetic claims.
Şandiyên “herî mezin” (super-apostles, sarcastic)	Irony is not automatically legible in written Kurdish without visual/typographic marking; a flat rendering risks being read as Paul’s own admiring or neutral label for a genuinely superior class of apostle.	Mandatory quotation marks or an explicit translator’s-note flag at every occurrence marking this as Paul’s sarcasm, never presented as a real category.
milyaketê ronahiyê (angel of light, 11:14)	As above (§1.7), tension with mainstream regional angelology’s assumption that angels cannot sin or deceive; Satan’s ability to convincingly mimic an angel of light may read as doctrinally odd without a brief explanatory frame.	Add a short contextual gloss the first time this appears in a lesson, clarifying this describes deceptive imitation, not an actual corrupted angel.
Çekên Şer / Kelehên hiş (weapons of warfare / strongholds, ch. 10)	Kurdish audiences carry an unusually strong, often very recent, lived history of actual armed resistance (Peshmerga ethos, guerrilla conflict across all four host states); military metaphor here risks being read with more literal-political weight than Paul intended, or conversely trivializing readers’ real war experience by using it as a mere figure of speech.	Anchor firmly and explicitly as metaphor for spiritual argument/persuasion against false teaching, with a sensitivity note in teaching material acknowledging (without dwelling on) the metaphor’s proximity to lived experience.
her ramanek dîl girtin (take every thought captive, 10:5)	“Dîl” (prisoner of war/captive) is an emotionally loaded, historically real term across a region marked by actual war captivity; using it lightly as a figure of speech risks minimizing real trauma associated with the word.	Retain (no better lexical option exists) but flag for native-speaker sensitivity review; consider a brief pastoral framing note for teachers rather than altering the translation itself.

Doctrine-level recommendation: High, primarily a framing and marking risk (irony, metaphor literalization) rather than a doctrinal-collision risk of the Critical tier seen in doctrines 1.4–1.6.

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2. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods

2.1 Genuinely Missing Vocabulary (no adequate native term exists)

Concept	Gap	Resolution
Paul’s specific sense of ministerial “sincerity” (eilikrineia/haplotēs, transparent non-manipulative motive)	No single native Kurdish word isolates this from general honesty (rastî) or straightforwardness.	Coin/retain the compound Rastdilî (“straight-heartedness”) as the fixed technical term; do not reach for the readily-available but doctrinally toxic Arabic-derived ikhlas root.
”Made to be sin” (5:21), the specific forensic identification of the sinless Christ with sin’s guilt	No Kurdish theological vocabulary exists for this precise substitutionary-imputation concept; a bare literal rendering is actively misleading.	Use the expanded gloss Xwedê ew kir mîna sûcdar (“God made him like a guilty one”) plus mandatory translator’s expansion note at every occurrence — this is a structural gap requiring paraphrase, not a single-word solution.
”Not counting their trespasses” (5:19), the reverse-direction imputation verb	No single verb captures non-imputation cleanly.	Compound ne-hesibandina sûcan, reusing the baseline’s hesibandin root established for Romans 4’s positive imputation, so the doctrinal symmetry between “credited righteousness” and “not-credited sin” is visible across both curricula.
”God of this age” as a title for Satan (4:4)	Kurdish (like the source languages) has no ready-made vocabulary for applying a divine-sounding title to a false power without creating catastrophic ambiguity.	Mandatory descriptive paraphrase serokê ruhanî yê vê dinyayê (“the spiritual ruler of this age”) — the bare noun Xwedê must never appear in this construction under any circumstance.
”Cheerful giver” as a structural contrast to obligatory quota-giving	Kurdish giving vocabulary (rooted in regional zakat/sadaqa practice) has abundant words for charitable giving but none that natively encode “voluntary, uncompelled, non-quota” as a positive theological category rather than simply “generous.”	Retain the descriptive phrase yê ku bi kefxweşî dide with mandatory explicit negation of compulsion at first occurrence, since no single word carries this contrast alone.

2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (multiple existing concepts competing for the same word or word-family)

Kurdish term/root	Competing occupants of the semantic space	Fencing strategy
Kerem	(1) baseline salvation-grace; (2) Sufi keramet (elite miracle-grace for advanced saints); (3) 2 Corinthians’ extended sense of grace-motivated financial generosity (chs. 8–9); (4) implicitly, zakat/sadaqa’s obligatory-giving framework, which is NOT Kerem but sits right next to it in the reader’s mental map.	Explicit doctrine-note at every ch. 8-9 occurrence distinguishing Kerem from both Sufi keramet (no spiritual-elite restriction) and zakat/sadaqa (no obligation/quota). This is the single most crowded neighborhood in the curriculum.
Ruh / Ruhê Pîroz	(1) the divine Person of the Holy Spirit (baseline, capitalized register); (2) Paul’s contextual “letter vs. spirit” argument in ch. 3 (lowercase, the life-giving principle Paul identifies with the Lord’s Spirit in v.17); (3) generic Kurdish usage of “ruh” for “spirit/soul” in ordinary speech (e.g., “ruhê min” = my spirit/soul, with no theological loading at all).	Scope the lowercase Ruh usage strictly to 3:6 and 3:17-18’s letter/Spirit argument; everywhere else, default to full Ruhê Pîroz. Flag both for theologian review specifically because the register distinction is fragile in running Kurdish text.
Azadî / Rizgarî	Both sit inside the same crowded neighborhood as Kurdish political-nationalist liberation vocabulary (“Azadî û Rizgariya Kurdistanê”); 2 Corinthians activates Azadî (3:17) for the first time in this curriculum family, doubling the baseline’s existing single-term political-collision risk into a two-term cluster.	Apply identical anchoring discipline to both terms without exception; never let either stand in a sentence without an explicit spiritual referent attached (from what/whom is one being freed/saved).
Pesindan / serbilindî (boasting)	Competes against the honor-shame culture’s default positive valuation of visible self-praise/status-display (namûs, şeref) — the neighborhood is not another doctrine but an entire cultural value-system that reads “boasting” as normally good when justified, the reverse of Paul’s mostly negative usage except in his deliberately ironic weakness-boasting (chs. 10-12).	Teaching material must flag every boasting occurrence as either (a) negative — self-promotion Paul condemns, or (b) ironic — Paul’s deliberate inversion in chs. 10-12; never leave the valence ambiguous.
Nûner (ambassador)	Shares space with contemporary KRG diplomatic-representative usage (“nûnertî”), itself entangled with the unresolved Kurdish statehood question.	Keep strictly in the personal-appeal register of 5:20 (see §1.5); avoid any teaching material phrasing that echoes political-representation rhetoric.
Çekên Şer / Kelehên hiş / dîl girtin (military metaphor cluster, ch. 10)	Shares space with genuine, recent lived experience of armed conflict and captivity across the four host states.	See §1.8; explicit metaphor-anchoring and sensitivity notes required throughout ch. 10.

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3. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Term	Decision	Rationale
Reconciliation (katallagē)	Paraphrase/native compound (Lihevanîn)	No transliteration option exists (not a proper name); native compound is transparent and reusable, provided fenced per §1.1.
New creation (kainē ktisis)	Native compound (Afirandina Nû)	Transliteration is impossible for a descriptive phrase; “afirandin” is already the settled Kurdish Christian word for divine creation, giving doctrinal continuity with Genesis language.
God of this age (title for Satan)	Mandatory paraphrase, never transliteration or literal calque	A literal calque using Xwedê risks catastrophic ambiguity; this is the clearest case in the curriculum where paraphrase is doctrinally required, not merely stylistically preferred.
Made to be sin (5:21)	Mandatory expanded paraphrase with translator’s note	Greek’s compressed forensic idiom has no single-word or short-phrase Kurdish equivalent; literal translation is explicitly rejected as misleading (see §2.1).
Sincerity (eilikrineia/haplotēs)	Native compound (Rastdilî), explicitly NOT transliteration of any Arabic-rooted term	Transliterating or borrowing the Arabic ikhlas root is the single most dangerous available shortcut in this doctrine; native compounding is mandatory, not optional.
Abba (8:15 register, cf. Romans precedent; not in 2 Corinthians directly but relevant to Father/Bav doctrine continuity)	Retain transliteration (Aba) per baseline	Consistency with Romans; not directly re-triggered in 2 Corinthians but noted for cross-curriculum consistency.
Paradise (paradeisos, 12:4)	Qualified transliteration/loan (Bihuştê Xwedê)	“Bihuşt”/“Cenet” are shared regional loanwords for paradise; bare use would blend indistinguishably with Islamic eschatology’s paradise concept. The qualifier “of God” (Xwedê) is mandatory, making this a qualified-loan rather than a pure transliteration.
Super-apostles, false apostles (compound titles)	Native compounding off baseline “Şandî”	Consistent with baseline’s existing native-compound strategy (avoiding Arabic-derived “resûl”); transliteration is not applicable to compound descriptive titles.
Messenger of Satan (12:7)	Native paraphrase using “qasid”, not transliteration of “angel”	Deliberately avoids “milyaket” (angel) to sidestep a doctrinal collision with regional angelology (see §1.7); “qasid” (generic envoy/agent) is a safe native paraphrase.
Thorn in the flesh, weapons of warfare, strongholds (concrete metaphor images)	Direct native-image translation, no transliteration needed	These are concrete image-metaphors that transfer naturally into Kurdish agrarian/martial cultural vocabulary; transliteration is not a relevant category here — the risk is metaphor-literalization, not lexical gap (see §1.7–1.8).
Proper names (Paul, Titus, Corinth, Macedonia, Achaia, Damascus, etc.)	Established/consistent transliteration	Follow Kitêba Pîroz conventions and baseline precedent (Pawlos, etc.); new proper names in 2 Corinthians (Titus = Tîtûs, Corinth = Korîntos, Macedonia = Makedonya, Achaia = Axaya) should be fixed in translation memory at Phase 1 Step 3/4 following the same transliteration logic as baseline names, and held constant across all lessons.

General principle applied throughout: transliteration is reserved for proper names and for concepts (like Abba) with an established prior precedent of preserving foreign-language intimacy/force; paraphrase is required wherever a single Kurdish lexeme would either (a) not exist, or (b) actively import a competing doctrinal frame (ikhlas, milyaket, bare Xwedê for a false power).

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4. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities in 2 Corinthians

Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × likelihood of misreading × breadth of impact across the letter).

1. “God of this age” (4:4) — risk of Xwedê-ambiguity. A single careless rendering could functionally attribute spiritual blinding to the true God rather than to Satan. Mandatory paraphrase, mandatory theologian review at every occurrence. Highest severity because the failure mode is blasphemy-adjacent, not merely unclear.

2. “Made to be sin” (5:21) — risk of implying Christ’s moral nature became sinful. Central to the core passage (5:11-21) and to the entire Reconciliation doctrine; a literal rendering directly contradicts the “knew no sin” clause in the same verse. Mandatory expanded gloss and translator’s note at every occurrence.

3. Grace of giving vs. zakat/sadaqa (chs. 8–9) — risk of the entire generosity doctrine being absorbed into an obligatory-pillar framework. Because Kurdish-speaking readers live inside a religious economy structurally organized around zakat, this is not a one-off collision but a systemic interpretive gravity well spanning two full chapters. Requires the heaviest repeated explicit-contrast teaching of any doctrine in the letter.

4. Sincerity / Rastdilî vs. Arabic ikhlas (chs. 1–2). A single lexical borrowing error here would silently import Sura 112’s anti-Trinitarian argument into unrelated pastoral material — low probability if the forbidden-substitution rule is enforced, but catastrophic severity if missed. Ranked high because the failure mode (accidental anti-Trinity framing) is disproportionate to how minor the lexical choice might otherwise seem to a translator.

5. New covenant vs. naskh/abrogation (ch. 3, throughout). The single most theologically load-bearing doctrinal collision by breadth (affects the entire chapter’s argument, not one verse), since Paul’s “different in kind, not a correction” argument is easy to flatten into the region’s default abrogation framework if not actively taught against it at every relevant occurrence.

6. “Be reconciled to God” (5:20) — active vs. passive voice. If Kurmanji’s weaker grammaticalized passive causes translators to default to an active-reflexive rendering, the entire reconciliation argument’s direction (God as sole initiator) is quietly reversed. High-frequency risk because passive constructions are inherently harder to sustain in natural Kurmanji prose.

7. Azadî (3:17) compounding the baseline’s existing Rizgarî political-vocabulary risk. Two Critical-tier politically-loaded terms now appear in close proximity within a single doctrine (New Covenant), doubling the surface area for an unintended nationalist-liberation reading in this one chapter.

8. “Power made perfect in weakness” (12:9) — risk of communicative failure without doctrinal error. The Kurdish rendering can be lexically accurate while still being read straight past, because it inverts the honor-shame culture’s default valuation of visible strength; failure here is silent (a reader nods and moves on without registering the paradox) rather than loud, making it harder to catch in review.

9. Super-apostles / boasting irony (chs. 10–12) — risk of sarcasm read as sincere praise. Without explicit typographic or annotative marking, Paul’s rhetorical irony could be taken at face value, inverting his entire polemical strategy against the rival teachers.

10. Veil / Perde (3:13-16) — risk of unintended commentary on literal head-covering practice. Lower doctrinal centrality than items 1-9, but high everyday-word-frequency means the metaphorical use could easily be misheard as addressing an unrelated live social-religious practice question if not clearly anchored as a metaphor for obscured understanding at first occurrence.

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5. Summary Recommendations for Phase 1 Step 3/4 (Translation Memory Consolidation)

• All terms in analysis/08_core_glossary.md marked “reuse exactly” are confirmed compatible with this gap analysis and require no further adjustment.
• All new terms proposed in the core glossary should be added to translation_memory.json with the risk tiers assigned there, cross-checked against the fencing and paraphrase requirements identified in this document.
• The four terms/clusters requiring mandatory expansion notes or paraphrase enforcement (not just glossary lookup) are: “God of this age,” “made to be sin,” “not counting their trespasses,” and the grace-of-giving/zakat contrast. These should be flagged in translation memory with a requires_expansion_note: true field at the next schema update, since a bare glossary lookup is insufficient to prevent doctrinal error for these four.
• The letter/Spirit (Ruh/Ruhê Pîroz) register distinction in chapter 3 should be flagged as a standing editorial rule for all Phase 2 workers, since it cannot be resolved by translation memory lookup alone (same headword, different register, context-dependent).
• New proper names (Titus, Corinth, Macedonia, Achaia, and others occurring across chs. 1-13) should be formally transliterated and locked into translation memory before Phase 2 begins, following the same conventions as baseline proper names.