01 — Executive Summary: Amos (阿摩司书) Translation Requirements

English → Mandarin | Phase 1 Deliverable Summary

Curriculum: Amos 1–9 Core passage: Amos 5:18–24 Curriculum doctrines: Social Justice and Care for the Poor; Judgment on Empty Religious Ritual; God’s Sovereignty over All Nations; The Day of the Lord as Judgment; The Restoration of David’s Fallen Tent (Messianic Hope)

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Why It Matters

Amos is the first Old Testament book layered onto the Mandarin Language Package built for Romans, and it introduces a genuinely new failure mode: Hebrew prophetic-lawsuit vocabulary colliding with Confucian, Daoist, and folk-Buddhist frameworks in ways the NT-only baseline never had to address. The core passage (5:18–24) sits at the doctrinal center of the whole book — Israel’s expectation that “the Day of the LORD” would bring vindication is reversed into judgment — and that reversal depends on Mandarin vocabulary decisions (耶和华的日子, 公义/公平, 万军之耶和华) that have no clean native equivalent and multiple tempting false friends. Getting this wrong doesn’t just blur a nuance; it can invert the doctrine entirely (e.g., a dropped negation in “I will not again pass by them,” 8:2).

Key Findings

• One true vocabulary gap identified: “Day of the LORD” (耶和华的日子) has no native Mandarin compound that carries both “a personal God’s specific judgment day” and “reversal of a false expectation of vindication.” The fixed CUV compound is retained; the reversal nuance must be carried by teaching material, not the phrase alone.
• One dual-direction collision term inherited and extended from Romans: 义 (yì), Critical in the baseline for its Confucian Five-Constant-Virtues collision, now appears in Amos’s 公义/公平 (tsedaqah/mishpat) running in the opposite risk direction — Amos genuinely demands lived social righteousness, so under-explaining is now as dangerous as over-explaining.
• Six crowded semantic neighborhoods requiring permanent fencing, not one-time term selection: justice/righteousness vocabulary, care-for-the-poor vocabulary, divine judgment/wrath vocabulary, worship/ritual-site vocabulary, prophetic-office vocabulary, and God’s-calling/election vocabulary all have multiple fluent, tempting Mandarin near-equivalents that each import a different non-biblical tradition (功德/慈悲 merit-accounting, 报应/天谴 karmic automatism, 天命 revocable cosmic mandate, 庙会/烧香 folk temple practice, 算命先生/通灵者 divination, 天命所归 cosmic entitlement).
• Full-book coverage confirmed: all 9 chapters surveyed; every doctrine traced to specific supporting passages beyond the core passage alone (per PRD mandate).
• 96 terms now recorded in the Amos translation_memory.json: 29 inherited exactly from the Romans baseline (locked, no deviation permitted) and 67 new Amos-specific entries.

Risks

• 12 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review (5 Critical + 7 High) per doctrine_risk_registry.json: Social Justice and Care for the Poor, Judgment on Empty Religious Ritual, God’s Sovereignty over All Nations, The Day of the Lord as Judgment, and The Restoration of David’s Fallen Tent (all Critical); Divine Election and Accountability, Certainty and Inescapability of Judgment, Call to Covenantal Repentance, Prophetic Calling and Authority, Economic Injustice and Commercial Fraud, Judicial Corruption and Justice in the Gate, and Universal Scope of the Restored Kingdom (all High).
• 22 individual terms require mandatory human theologian review (6 Critical + 16 High) per bible_term_registry.json, including 耶和华, 万军之耶和华, 耶和华的日子, 公义, 大卫倒塌的帐幕 (Critical) and 公平, 平安祭, 困苦人/贫穷人, 义人, 认识, 耶和华选定我, 称为我名下的, 古实人 (High), among others.
• Highest single-point failure risk: a dropped or misplaced negation in “I will not again pass by them” (我必不再宽恕他们, Amos 8:2) would invert certain judgment into promised mercy — a linguistically invisible error type that automated tools will not catch without a dedicated negation check.
• Highest silent-drift risk: 认识 (Amos 3:2, covenant “knowing”) is fluent, natural Mandarin as a bare cognitive gloss and would pass a native-speaker review undetected, yet silently empties the verse of its covenant-election force — ranked above some Critical-tier terms in practical detection difficulty.
• Messianic-hope risk: 大卫倒塌的帐幕 (booth of David, 9:11) is vulnerable to two independent, culturally-native upgrade pressures — palace/throne imagery and the cyclical dynastic-restoration narrative frame (治乱循环) — either of which would blunt the “restoration from genuine ruin, and this time final” logic essential to the doctrine.

Opportunities

• Strong CUV foundation: Amos’s sacrificial, prophetic, and proper-name vocabulary (燔祭, 素祭, 先知, 大卫, nation names) is already well-established in Chinese Bible tradition; the translation task is defense of existing good vocabulary against three sets of borrowed meanings (Confucian, Buddhist/folk, Daoist), not invention from scratch.
• Natural bridge to Romans doctrines: Amos’s demand for lived righteousness (公义) is a built-in teaching opportunity to clarify — not contradict — Romans’ forensic righteousness-by-faith (义/称义), turning a translation risk into a curriculum strength when both are taught together as instructed.
• Acts 15 bridge: Amos 9:11-12’s “called by my name” and “booth of David” give the curriculum a ready-made, textually explicit link (via the Jerusalem Council’s citation) from OT messianic hope to NT Gentile inclusion, reinforcing the baseline’s “unity_of_jews_and_gentiles” doctrine with an OT anchor text.

Recommended Actions

1. Route all Critical/High doctrines and terms (12 doctrines; 22 terms) through mandatory human theologian review before any Phase 2 segment is marked approved, per the escalation rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md v1.28.
2. Deploy an automated negation-integrity check specifically for the eight-nation refrain and the “I will not again pass by them” (8:2) formula, given the invert-the-doctrine failure mode identified above.
3. Deploy an automated back-translation flag for any bare cognitive gloss of 认识 (Amos 3:2) and 后悔 (Amos 7:3, 6), given their linguistically-invisible drift risk.
4. Enforce the mandatory cross-reference notes between Amos 公义/义人 and Romans 义/称义, and between Amos 平安祭 and Romans 平安, at the template level (not left to per-translator discretion), per the theological consistency rules in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
5. Carry the core passage (5:18–24) and the closing restoration (9:11–15) forward as fixed, locked renderings across every lesson in the curriculum, consistent with the baseline’s treatment of Romans 1:16–17, 8:28, and 10:9–10.

This summary depends on and should be read alongside assets/translation_memory.json, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, analysis/04_comparative_theology.md, analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, analysis/07_semantic_analysis.md, analysis/08_core_glossary.md, and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md.