Core Glossary

translation_memory.json is the enforced glossary for every Phase 2 translation in this curriculum. This document summarizes its shape and the principles behind it; see the Glossary Risk Groups for the full per-term entries.

Composition

The glossary currently holds 47 terms spanning all four risk tiers, drawn from the doctrines identified in Doctrine Analysis and grounded in the cultural risks identified in Culture Analysis. Every term entry records:

• The approved Malayalam translation and transliteration
• The doctrine risk tier (Critical/High/Medium/Low)
• Explicitly rejected alternatives, with reasons
• Notes explaining any non-obvious translation choice

Governing principles

1. Established Christian-tradition usage over generically “natural” Malayalam — this is Malayalam’s defining principle, distinct from most other languages in this pipeline. Where Satyavedapustakam and the wider Malayalam theological literary tradition already have a settled rendering (ദൈവം, യേശു, കര്‍ത്താവ്, ക്രിസ്തു), this glossary follows it, even where a broader, non-Christian-authored Malayalam corpus might make a different word statistically more common.
2. Guard against AI-drift, not community syncretism — for most Critical terms, the explicit rejection exists to defend settled correct vocabulary against a generic AI system’s statistical pull, not to correct an error already circulating among Malayalam Christians.
3. Name inverted and lateral risks explicitly — several entries (saints, gentiles, grace) don’t fit the “avoid the obviously wrong word” pattern common elsewhere in this pipeline; the notes field calls out these different risk shapes specifically so reviewers don’t apply the wrong mental model.
4. Version-controlled and append-only in Phase 2 — if a new term is discovered during document translation, it is added to translation memory and the version number incremented, never silently improvised per-document.

Relationship to the Doctrine Risk Registry

Every glossary term’s doctrine field links back to an entry in doctrine_risk_registry.json, so a term’s risk tier is always traceable to the specific doctrine it protects — the glossary enforces vocabulary, the doctrine registry explains why that vocabulary matters.