Executive Summary: Acts 1–28 Translation Requirements (Maithili)

Why it matters

Acts is the founding narrative of the Christian church — Pentecost, the gospel’s move from Jews to Gentiles, and the apostles’ bold witness under persecution — landing in a Maithili-speaking context with no settled indigenous Christian translation tradition to draw on (only one fully published New Testament, 2010) and the most emotionally “owned” competing religious narrative in this pipeline: Mithila is the Ramayana’s own geographic setting, Sita’s traditional birthplace and the Sita-Ram marriage site at Janakpur. Every choice this Language Package makes now functions as precedent, not as a response to existing dispute.

Key findings

• 147 total glossary terms are now locked for Phase 2: 47 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, plus 100 new Acts-specific terms (89 from full-book semantic analysis, 10 previously-undocumented gap terms, 1 proposed-but-not-yet-ratified coinage).
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41) carries the single densest concentration of Critical-risk doctrine in the book — Pentecost’s wind/fire imagery collides directly with actively-worshipped Vedic deities (Vayu/Pavan, Agni); “other tongues” must be fenced from regional spirit-possession trance-speech; and the salvation confession, repentance, and baptism doctrines all require mandatory standing translator notes.
• Three real-world “live collision” episodes make Acts uniquely high-stakes compared to Romans: the Lystra incarnation-mistaken-identity scene (14:8-18), Simon Magus’s and the sons of Sceva’s occult-power episodes (8:9-24; 19:12-16), and the Artemis goddess-cult riot (19:23-41) — each is the sharpest real-world New Testament parallel to a risk the baseline only described abstractly.
• “The Way” (मार्ग) is a newly-introduced Critical-risk term with no safe alternative rendering — it sits inside Mithila’s own three-path (bhakti-mārg/karma-mārg/jñāna-mārg) soteriological vocabulary and requires a mandatory clarifying note at every occurrence, not just the first.
• Full-book coverage is confirmed: all 28 chapters were reviewed; chapters contributing minimal new vocabulary (12, 23, 25, 27) are explicitly documented as reviewed rather than silently omitted, with Acts 27 flagged as the book’s clearest sustained Providence narrative despite introducing no new terms.

Risks

• Term-level risk (assets/bible_term_registry.json + translation_memory.json): 19 Critical-risk terms, 36 High-risk terms — 55 terms requiring mandatory human theologian review on every occurrence.
• Doctrine-level risk (assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json): 13 Critical doctrines, 19 High doctrines — 32 of 40 total doctrines require human theologian review; 6 require native speaker review; only 2 are automated-review-only.
• The highest-compounding risk is the core passage itself: Acts 2:1-41 alone touches at least 7 of the 13 Critical doctrines (Holy Spirit and Pentecost, Universal Scope of the Gospel, Lordship of Christ, Resurrection of Christ, Messianic Promise, Calling on the Name of the Lord, Repentance and Baptism), meaning a single mistranslated segment here can cascade doctrinal damage across the entire curriculum’s thesis.
• A process risk, not just a content risk, was identified: ten load-bearing terms (Jew, synagogue, Pharisee, Sadducee, high priest, angel, Sabbath, fasting, blasphemy, Sanhedrin) had no prior registry entry at all despite high frequency; without this gap-closure, parallel Phase 2 workers would have improvised inconsistent renderings across documents.

Opportunities

• Maithili’s shared Sanskrit-tatsama vocabulary with Hindi (per the Translation Landscape) allows disciplined adaptation of well-tested Hindi Critical-term choices rather than invention from nothing — the same strategy the Romans baseline already validated.
• Acts’ own narrative repeatedly models the correct doctrinal response to the region’s dominant religious phenomena (Paul and Barnabas’s refusal of worship at Lystra; Paul’s exorcism rather than negotiation with the divining spirit; the apostolic decree’s pastoral handling of food offered to idols) — these built-in contrasts can be leveraged pastorally rather than treated only as translation hazards.
• The Jerusalem Council’s resolution (Acts 15:11) offers a uniquely clear, narrative (not merely propositional) anchor for “grace apart from law-keeping,” reinforcing Romans’ justification doctrine through story rather than argument alone.

Recommended actions

1. Merge all 100 new terms in assets/translation_memory.json (including the 10 gap-closure terms) into the enforced Phase 2 database before any segment translation begins; do not activate ascension_heading_term until theologian ratification.
2. Route Acts 2:1-41, Acts 14:8-18, and Acts 16:16-19:41 to the most experienced theologian/reviewer pairing available for Phase 2 Step 16 batch scheduling, per the linguistic gap analysis’s explicit recommendation.
3. Enforce the expanded “standing note” requirement (not just first-occurrence) for मार्ग (the Way), आगि सन जीभ (tongues of fire), and the idol/sorcery/goddess-cult cluster, since abbreviated Phase 2 passes are the likeliest failure point for these terms.
4. Treat the 32 theologian-review and 6 native-speaker-review doctrines as a fixed minimum Phase 2 reviewer-hour allocation; do not permit automated-only clearance to creep beyond the 2 doctrines (Thanksgiving and Gratitude; Legal and Procedural Vocabulary) explicitly rated Low risk.
5. Carry forward every Romans-baseline forbidden substitution unchanged and layer the Acts-specific forbidden list on top, per analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md, so Phase 2 validation never regresses on already-solved Romans-curriculum risks while processing Acts.

See assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md, analysis/08_core_glossary.md, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md for full supporting detail behind every figure cited above.