Executive Summary: Revelation → Maithili Translation Requirements

Why it matters

Revelation is the highest-collision-risk book this pipeline has processed for Maithili. It extends the Romans baseline’s 30 tracked doctrines into 20 new or extended doctrines, introduces roughly 100 new load-bearing terms, and lands almost every one of its central images — a slain Lamb worshipped by four living creatures, a woman clothed with the sun, a bride’s wedding, a book determining postmortem destiny, a serpent-dragon, a beast, a final cosmic renewal — directly on top of Mithila’s own most cherished and most actively practiced religious vocabulary. Where Romans mostly fought a missing-vocabulary problem, Revelation fights a crowded-neighborhood problem: the danger is not that Maithili lacks words, but that it has the wrong words standing ready and eager to be used. The core passage, Revelation 21:1-8, sits at the exact center of this risk, combining the pralaya-cycle collision (new heaven/earth), the reincarnation collision (second death), and the Chitragupta collision (book of life, at 21:27) in eight verses.

Key findings

• Doctrine-level risk: 10 of 20 Revelation-specific doctrines are Critical, 9 are High, 1 is Medium, 0 are Low. 19 of 20 doctrines require human theologian review; 1 (Mission and Witness to the Nations) requires native speaker review only.
• Term-level risk: the new Revelation vocabulary alone contributes 17 Critical, 24 High, 31 Medium, and 12 Low risk terms (per 08_core_glossary.md), on top of 46 terms inherited unchanged from the Romans baseline (7 Critical, most of the remainder High).
• The single highest-priority item in the whole curriculum is the “book of life” (जीवनक पुस्तक) — a near-perfect structural parallel to Chitragupta’s karmic deeds-ledger, occurring at the doctrinal climax of the core passage itself (21:27).
• The Church as Bride of Christ is an entirely new doctrine with no Romans-baseline counterpart, and carries the single highest concentration of destination-specific collision risk of any doctrine in either curriculum, because Mithila is not a generic setting for bridal theology — it is the geographic home of the Sita-Ram wedding (Janakpur, Vivah Panchami).
• Four other image-clusters carry near-identical severity: the four living creatures (deity-vāhana/mount imagery), the Beast (Pashupatinath resonance), the dragon (Nag Panchami veneration), and the woman clothed with the sun (Durga/Devi iconography) — together forming a single recognizable pattern (“images that look like our own religious pictures but name something entirely different”) requiring coordinated, not isolated, translator training.
• Only four genuinely missing-vocabulary gaps were identified across the whole book (a shared divine-human throne, a non-cyclical bounded “thousand years,” a symbolic sevenfold Spirit, and the dual bride/city metaphor); every other difficulty is resolved by disciplined lexical fencing of existing vocabulary, not new coinage.

Risks

• Reincarnation bleed-through: “second death,” “first resurrection,” and the whole Hades/lake-of-fire/book-of-life cluster can be silently reabsorbed into the punarjanma-and-karma worldview if translator notes are dropped on repeat occurrences — a live risk this package addresses by requiring the note at every occurrence, not just first use, for this cluster specifically.
• Goddess/avatar/serpent syncretism: the woman clothed with the sun, the Beast, and the dragon each sit close enough to revered regional figures (Durga/Devi, Pashupatinath, venerated nāgas) that an unguarded rendering could be read as commentary on, or even veiled criticism of, those figures rather than as naming a wholly distinct spiritual reality.
• Bridal-narrative cross-reading: without disciplined restraint, a well-meaning translator’s instinct to “naturalize” the marriage-of-the-Lamb passages with regionally warm wedding vocabulary would deepen, not defuse, the Sita-Ram/Radha-Krishna collision.
• Worship-scene visual overlap: even with the correct verb (आराधना करब, never पूजा) fixed, the sheer visual density of incense, prostration, and crown-casting in Revelation’s throne-room scenes creates a scene-level risk beyond any single word choice.

Opportunities

• Revelation’s own text supplies its strongest safeguard against several of these risks: the angel’s explicit, repeated refusal of worship (19:10, 22:8-9) is a built-in teaching moment on worship’s exclusivity that this package can foreground rather than merely translate.
• The book’s closing benediction (22:21) returns to the same grace vocabulary (अनुग्रह) that opens Romans, giving this curriculum a natural, theologically rich bridge back to the baseline package and reinforcing the whole-Bible coherence of the term choices already made.
• Because so few genuinely new coinages were required, Phase 2 translation work can proceed largely on a fencing-and-annotation model rather than a term-invention model, which is faster to review and easier to audit for consistency.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 19 theologian-review doctrines and every Critical/High term for full human theologian sign-off before Phase 2 begins, prioritizing the ranked list in 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md (book of life, new heaven/earth, bride/marriage, second death, and four living creatures first).
2. Treat the judgment-afterlife cluster (Hades, book of life, lake of fire, second death, judged-according-to-works) and the deity-form cluster (Beast, dragon, four living creatures, woman clothed with the sun) as single grouped review units, not term-by-term, given their systemic (not atomistic) collision risk.
3. Require the mandatory translator note on every occurrence, not just first occurrence, for the highest-severity cluster (book of life, second death, new/pralaya, bride/marriage) per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
4. Produce a single standing “how to read Revelation’s pictures” teacher preface for the Symbolic and Apocalyptic Interpretation doctrine, rather than repeating a full genre explanation at every image.
5. Carry the Revelation 21:1-8 core passage’s full fixed-phrase set into every downstream teaching document verbatim, exactly as Romans 1:16-17, 8:28, and 10:9-10 are already treated as non-negotiable fixed strings.