Executive Summary: James → Maithili Language Package

Why it matters: James puts “faith” and “works” side by side in the same argument James 2:14-26 makes central to this curriculum — and Maithili’s everyday religious vocabulary already has a fully confident, fully fluent answer for how deeds relate to divine favor: कर्म (karma). Translating James into Maithili is not a neutral linguistic task; done carelessly, it hands a karma-merit audience what reads like scriptural confirmation of the very framework the gospel corrects. This Language Package exists to make sure it doesn’t.

Key findings

• 28 distinct doctrines identified across all 5 chapters of James (full-book coverage, not core-passage-only), of which 5 are Critical risk and 12 are High risk — a combined 17 doctrines requiring mandatory human theologian review, against 9 requiring native-speaker review and 2 requiring automated review only.
• The core passage (James 2:14-26) alone carries 3 of the book’s 5 Critical-tier doctrines — Faith and Works, Justification as Vindication by Works, and the Sequence of Imputed Righteousness — meaning this ~13-verse passage should receive full-coverage theologian review in Phase 2, not sampling.
• 57 Critical-or-High-risk terms now sit in the merged Romans+James translation memory (23 Critical, 34 High across both packages combined), up from Romans’ baseline count, reflecting how densely James’s practical-ethical vocabulary intersects Mithila’s devotional and philosophical default settings.
• Five newly-identified James-specific collision points have no Romans precedent and required fresh terminology decisions: कर्म (works vs. karma-merit doctrine), सिद्ध-avoidance (माturity vs. yogic/tantric siddha-attainment), जगत-vs-संसार (worldliness vs. the rebirth-cycle), प्रभु यीशुक पुनरागमन-vs-अवतरण (the Lord’s return vs. Kalki-avatar eschatology), and तेल लगाएब-vs-अभिषेक (anointing vs. Shaiva ritual consecration).
• Every chapter of James contributes new load-bearing vocabulary — unlike some NT letters, no chapter was “reviewed with no new risk”; the full-book coverage mandate surfaced doctrinally live material in all five chapters.

Risks

• कर्म (works) is an unavoidable but load-bearing risk. No neutral Maithili alternative carries equivalent theological transparency; every occurrence in 1:25 and 2:14-26 requires a mandatory disambiguating note, with zero tolerance for drift toward “deeds earning उद्धार” framing.
• James 2:24 (“a person is justified by works and not by faith alone”) is the single highest-risk sentence in the entire curriculum — the sentence most likely, if mishandled, to read as direct scriptural endorsement of karma-merit theology to a Maithili-speaking audience.
• The avatar-eschatology collision recurs twice, not once: both James 4:4 (worldliness) and James 5:7-8 (the Lord’s return) sit adjacent to Mithila’s own devotionally rehearsed Ram/Krishna/Kalki narrative tradition via the regional Vidyapati literary tradition, compounding the incarnation-adjacent risk the Romans baseline already flagged as its single highest-stakes term category.
• Ritual-substitution risk is concrete, not abstract: अभिषेक (5:14 anointing) and प्रायश्चित्त (5:16 confession) are both fluent, natural-sounding Maithili words that a translator could substitute unconsciously mid-draft, each of which would silently reintroduce sacral-ritual or merit-earning theology into passages James presents as plain and grace-resting.
• Favoritism (2:1-13) names a live social practice, not a historical one — the Panjikaran caste-lineage genealogical registry administered by Maithil Brahmin pandits is an active, present-day institution; under-translating or softening this passage would blunt its intended, still-relevant force.

Opportunities

• Maithili’s agrarian register is a genuine asset for James specifically — the farmer-awaiting-rain patience metaphor (5:7), withered-grass imagery (1:10-11), and fig-tree/grapevine illustration (3:12) translate naturally and warmly into Mithila’s own agricultural life, without any of the collision risk found elsewhere in the book.
• Existing Maithili/Vidyapati-tradition proverbial wisdom about speech can be used positively to illustrate James 3’s tongue-taming teaching — a narrower, permitted exception to the general restriction on Sita-Ram/Ramayana-narrative idiom for doctrinal illustration.
• Abraham’s “friend of God” status (2:23) and the friendship-vs-world framing (4:4) can draw constructively, with care, on Mithila’s Vaishnava सख्य भाव (friendship-mode bhakti, e.g. Krishna-Arjuna/Sudama) as a teaching bridge for relational intimacy with God, provided the mutually-exclusive-loyalty structure is preserved and the devotional-technique framing is explicitly distinguished.
• The completed core glossary, term registry, and doctrine registry (Steps 7-8, 11) already give Phase 2 a fully fenced vocabulary set — the translation task from here is disciplined enforcement of already-made decisions, not further invention.

Recommended actions

1. Merge assets/translation_memory.json (James) into the active Phase 2 enforcement database alongside the frozen Romans baseline file; do not treat either as optional.
2. Route James 2:14-26 for full-coverage (not sampled) human theologian review in Phase 2 Step 17, given its concentration of 3 Critical-tier doctrines.
3. Enforce the six-term mandatory-footnote list (कर्म, धर्मी घोषित कएल जाएब [James sense], जगत, प्रभु यीशुक पुनरागमन, तेल लगाएब, स्वीकार करब) at every occurrence without exception, per analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
4. Brief all human theologian reviewers on the Panjikaran/favoritism parallel and the Kalki-avatar/parousia parallel before Phase 2 review begins, since both require cultural-theological context beyond the bare translated text to evaluate correctly.
5. Carry the fatalism-avoidance framing (धैर्य/धीरज vs. प्रारब्ध) consistently from the Romans providence doctrine into James’s trials, endurance, and patience vocabulary, so learners encounter one coherent theology of suffering and hope across both curricula.