Executive Summary — Mark Language Package (Maithili)

Why it matters

Mark is the first curriculum built on the Maithili Language Package since the Romans baseline established the region’s controlling doctrinal vocabulary. Mark’s narrative genre — exorcisms, healings, a suffering-then-vindicated Son of Man, a servant who gives his life “as a ransom for many” (10:45) — repeatedly stages Jesus in roles that Mithila’s active Vaishnava bhakti, Shaiva/Tantra guru-diksha, and folk-exorcism (ojha/sokha) traditions already have vivid, ready-made vocabulary for. That vocabulary points in a different theological direction almost every time. Getting this book right matters more than getting Romans right did, because narrative repeats these collision points a dozen times across sixteen chapters rather than arguing a doctrine once and moving on.

Key findings

• 44 of 85 tracked terms (52%) are Critical or High risk and require mandatory human theologian review: 19 Critical-tier terms (including Son of Man, the ransom, “for many,” the soul/life given up, the Transfiguration, the dereliction cry, and body/blood of the covenant) and 25 High-tier terms (including teacher/guru, baptism, authority, slave, servant, and the temple).
• 26 of 40 tracked doctrines (65%) require human theologian review (12 Critical, 14 High), against 12 requiring native speaker review and only 2 requiring automated review only — a heavier theologian-review load proportionally than the Romans baseline carried.
• The core passage, Mark 10:35–45, alone concentrates five of the curriculum’s eight doctrines (Servanthood versus Worldly Greatness, Discipleship and Self-Denial, the Son of Man Title, the Suffering Servant, and the Ransom for Many) and contains the single highest-stakes phrase in the whole package: छुटकारा मोल (“ransom,” 10:45), a compound construction built from scratch because Maithili has no prior Christian theological vocabulary for a technical redemption-price concept at all.
• Sixty new terms had to be added to translation memory beyond the 25 reused from Romans — a 3:1 ratio of new-to-inherited vocabulary, reflecting how much less doctrinal overlap Mark’s narrative content has with Romans’ epistolary exposition than initially assumed.

Risks

• Self-collision within the core passage itself: प्रभुता जमाएब and अधिकार जमाएब (10:42’s condemned “lording it over”) are built directly on the roots of प्रभु (Lord) and अधिकार (Jesus’ own legitimate authority) — a translator or reviewer skimming quickly could mistake the condemned counterfeit for a description of Christ’s own rule, within the same paragraph.
• Devotionally “favorable” collisions, not merely unfamiliar ones: दास (slave, 10:44) and गुरु (teacher) are not obscure words needing definition — they are words the audience already uses positively in bhakti devotion and guru-lineage religion, making the fencing task harder than an ordinary unfamiliar-term problem.
• The Transfiguration (9:2-8) was not flagged at all in the Romans baseline and risks direct assimilation to Krishna’s Vishvarupa revelation to Arjuna, a locally cherished narrative — this is a genuinely new Critical-tier risk this curriculum introduces.
• Recurrence, not first-occurrence, is the real exposure: exorcism/healing narratives recur roughly a dozen times, and Gehenna/ascension/eternal-life each need their finality-versus-cyclical note reapplied at every occurrence, not just the first — a one-time footnote strategy will not hold across sixteen narrative chapters.
• No settled Maithili precedent exists for “ransom” or “Son of Man” — both are fresh compound constructions rather than adaptations of established Hindi Christian vocabulary, meaning there is no fallback precedent to lean on if the constructed renderings prove unclear in the field.

Opportunities

• Mark’s terse, repetitive narrative structure means that once a fencing note is well-constructed at first occurrence (e.g., गुरु at 4:38, दुष्ट आत्मा at 1:23), it can be reapplied efficiently across many later occurrences with consistent, low-marginal-cost review.
• The historical reality of debt-bondage/bonded-labor arrangements in Mithila’s agrarian economy offers a genuinely useful (if carefully fenced) illustrative bridge for छुटकारा मोल that the Romans baseline had no equivalent opportunity to use for its own soteriological vocabulary.
• Mark’s Gentile-inclusion narrative moments (7:24-30; 11:17; 13:10) let this curriculum enact, narratively and memorably, what Romans only argued doctrinally — a strong cross-curricular teaching opportunity once both packages are in use together.
• The Son of Man title’s parallel -क genitive construction (मनुष्यक पुत्र, echoing परमेश्वरक पुत्र) gives learners a visible, structural cue tying Mark’s central title back to the already-established baseline term for Son of God.

Recommended actions

1. Merge assets/translation_memory.json (version 2, 85 terms) into the Phase 2 enforcement pipeline before any Mark segment translation begins; do not process segments against the Romans-only version 1 file.
2. Route all 19 Critical-tier and 25 High-tier terms, and all 26 Critical/High doctrines, through mandatory human theologian pre-review per analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md’s escalation rules, with Mark 10:45/14:24 and Mark 6:50/14:62 reviewed as linked pairs, never independently.
3. Prioritize theologian review capacity on the ranked top-7 ambiguities identified in analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md §5 (ransom, “for many,” Son of Man, Transfiguration, slave/doulos, the lord-it-over self-collision, and “I am”) before general batch translation proceeds.
4. Treat every recurrence of a crowded-neighborhood term (गुरु, दास, सेवक, दुष्ट आत्मा, रहस्य, नरक, स्वर्गारोहण, मन्दिर) as requiring the same review discipline as its first occurrence, per the cross-cutting fencing principle established in the linguistic gap analysis.
5. Before Phase 2 begins, confirm with reviewers that the newly constructed compounds (छुटकारा मोल, मनुष्यक पुत्र, बहुतक बदलामे/बहुतक हेतु) read as coherent, dignified Maithili to a native theological reader, since no prior Maithili Christian precedent exists to fall back on if they do not.

Term-level risk summary: Critical 19 · High 25 · Medium 27 · Low 14 (total 85; 44 Critical+High require theologian review) Doctrine-level risk summary: Critical 12 · High 14 · Medium 12 · Low 2 (total 40; 26 Critical+High require theologian review)