Executive Summary: Jeremiah (English → Mandarin) Language Package

Why it matters

Jeremiah introduces the first Old Testament, Hebrew-sourced curriculum into this Mandarin translation pipeline. That shift surfaces translation risks the Greek-sourced Romans baseline never had to face — most urgently, the term 新约 (“new covenant”), which is simultaneously the correct rendering of the core passage’s central promise (Jeremiah 31:31-34) and the standard Mandarin Bible’s name for the entire New Testament book collection. Left unmanaged, every lesson risks quietly teaching “read the New Testament” instead of “God gives you a new, unbreakable, internal covenant relationship.” Five other newly identified Critical-tier collisions — most strikingly 天后 (“queen of heaven”), the literal honorific of the widely venerated folk deity Mazu — mean this package carries the highest concentration of live syncretism risk of any curriculum processed to date.

Key findings

• 16 total doctrines identified across the full 52-chapter book; 13 require mandatory human theologian review (4 Critical + 9 High), 2 require native speaker review, 1 is automated-only — matching doctrine_risk_registry.json exactly.
• 9 Critical-risk terms now in translation memory (新约, 耶和华, 神, 义, 耶和华我们的义, 恩典, 公义的苗裔, 淫乱/行淫, 天后), plus 24 High-risk terms — a combined 33 terms requiring theologian-level scrutiny at every occurrence, roughly 50% more than the Romans baseline’s term-level Critical/High count.
• Jeremiah introduces three genuinely new risk categories absent from the NT-epistolary baseline: (1) direct use of the personal divine name YHWH (耶和华) alongside the generic 神, requiring an explicit same-God clarifying note; (2) untranslatable Hebrew wordplay (שׁוּב shuv = return/repent; בָּעַל ba’al = husband/Baal) that Mandarin cannot reproduce in a single lexical item; (3) a marital-infidelity/idolatry master metaphor (淫乱/行淫) that is structurally load-bearing across three doctrines simultaneously.
• 天后 (queen of heaven) is the single highest live-culture collision in either package: it is the actual, currently-used title of Mazu (妈祖), one of the most widely venerated deities in Chinese popular religion. This term now carries the pipeline’s only mandatory dual-review requirement (human theologian AND native speaker, every occurrence, no exceptions).
• The false-prophecy diagnostic phrase “平安, 平安” (false “peace, peace”) exploits the same baseline term (平安) already flagged Medium-risk for folk-amulet collision — Jeremiah sharpens this into the single most exploitable mistranslation risk in the “False Prophets versus True Prophecy” doctrine, since it weaponizes a comforting, familiar word to mask real danger.

Risks

• 新约 footnote fatigue: because the standing clarifying footnote is required at every occurrence (not just first use) to prevent collapse into “New Testament book collection,” there is real risk of translators or reviewers treating repeated footnotes as redundant and quietly dropping them in later lessons — this must be explicitly guarded against in Phase 2 tooling.
• Merit-ledger misreading of restoration: Jeremiah 31:2-3 grounds Israel’s restoration in unearned grace (恩典) at the exact narrative moment — after decades of exile — when a “debt now paid” reading is most natural to readers steeped in the destination culture’s 功德/阴德 merit-accounting worldview.
• Fatalism collision on the curriculum’s most quotable verse: Jeremiah 29:11 (“plans for welfare, not evil”) is already a popular “life verse” in Chinese church culture and is highly exposed to a depersonalized, 天意-flavored reading if not consistently anchored to its original addressees.
• Idiom mechanical-error risk: the individual-responsibility proverb (31:29-30) sits one careless substitution away from being garbled by Mandarin’s own unrelated “sour grapes” idiom (吃不到葡萄说葡萄酸, meaning envy) — a QA-stage risk as much as a theological one.

Opportunities

• Mandarin’s 心 (heart) already carries whole-person (not merely emotional) connotations, making it a genuine asset for teaching the New Covenant’s heart-transformation promise — provided it is consistently fenced against Neo-Confucian self-cultivation (心性) categories, exactly as the baseline already fences 成圣.
• Jewish tradition’s teshuvah and Islamic tawbah (both explored in the comparative theology analysis) offer strong structural bridge-concepts for teaching the shuv (归回/悔改) wordplay’s repentance-return unity, even though Mandarin itself lacks a single word spanning both senses.
• The Confucian ideal of the loyal minister (忠臣) who suffers for speaking unwelcome truth to a wayward ruler offers a genuine, teachable cultural bridge into the “Weeping Prophet” doctrine, provided it stays tied to Jeremiah’s specifically divine commissioning rather than mere political loyalty.

Recommended actions

1. Approve and merge all “New (Jeremiah)” terms — especially the 9 Critical and 24 High-risk entries — into active translation memory only after Phase 1 Step 17 theologian sign-off, per the baseline’s Critical/High escalation rule.
2. Configure Phase 2 tooling to enforce the non-standard “footnote at every occurrence” rule for 新约, 耶和华/神 co-occurrence, and 天后 — standard footnote-deduplication logic must be disabled for these three terms specifically.
3. Stand up the mandatory dual-review (theologian + native speaker) pipeline stop for 天后 before any Phase 2 batch processing begins; this is a new review-routing pattern not present in the Romans baseline and requires its own queue.
4. Brief all native-speaker reviewers explicitly on the 平安 (false vs. genuine) and 归回/悔改 (return vs. repent) context-flagging conventions before Phase 2 begins, since both hinge on identical Mandarin strings carrying doctrinally opposite senses depending on context.

Full detail: see 04_comparative_theology.md, 06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md, 07_semantic_analysis.md, 08_core_glossary.md, 11_doctrine_analysis.md, assets/bible_term_registry.json, assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json, assets/translation_memory.json, and 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.