06 — Linguistic Gap Analysis: Jonah (English → Mandarin)

Purpose

This document executes PRD Phase 1 Step 8 for the book of Jonah. It identifies where Mandarin Chinese lacks a clean, risk-free equivalent for a load-bearing biblical concept, where existing Mandarin religious vocabulary is “crowded” by competing Buddhist, Daoist, or folk-religious associations that must be fenced off, which proper nouns/technical terms should be transliterated versus paraphrased, and ranks the highest-risk ambiguities specific to this book for Phase 2 attention. It extends — and does not contradict — the baseline Romans translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json, and is built directly on 08_core_glossary.md’s findings for this curriculum.

Coverage is full-book (Jonah 1–4) plus the mandatory NT typological bridge (Matthew 12:39-40), with the core passage (Jonah 3:1-10) receiving the deepest treatment as the curriculum’s theological anchor, per the five assigned doctrines.

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1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

For each assigned doctrine: the Mandarin terms currently available (baseline reuse + new Jonah terms), their structural weaknesses in Mandarin, and the recommended handling strategy for Phase 2.

1.1 God’s Compassion for the Nations

Available Mandarin Terms	Weaknesses	Recommended Strategy
恩典 (grace, baseline reuse)	None new — but Jonah 4:2 is the first curriculum text to apply this Critical-risk term explicitly to a Gentile nation rather than the covenant people or the individual believer. Risk is not the word itself but readers assuming grace-for-Israel/grace-for-me and missing grace-for-outsiders.	Reuse exactly. Teaching note required at 4:2: this is the same unmerited favor of Romans, now shown extending to Nineveh — the same doctrine, a wider audience.
怜悯 / 爱惜·怜惜 (mercy, pity — new High)	怜悯 alone risks reading as generic situational sympathy, detachable from covenant character. 爱惜/怜惜 (4:10-11) risks sounding sentimental/small-scale (used colloquially for cherishing possessions or pets) rather than carrying the weight of the book’s climactic rhetorical question.	Anchor 怜悯 explicitly to God’s self-revealed character (Exodus 34:6-7 quotation) rather than situational feeling. For 4:10-11, retain 爱惜/怜惜 but pair with explanatory framing (“as compassion for what he has made”) to avoid trivialization.
慈爱 (hesed, new High)	Shares its root character 慈 with Buddhist 慈悲 (non-relational compassion extended impartially to all sentient beings) and Confucian 仁爱/仁 (benevolence as a cultivated virtue). Readers may import either a Buddhist “compassion is simply what enlightened beings do” framework or a Confucian “benevolence is a virtue one performs” framework — both erase hesed’s covenantal, relationally specific, freely chosen character.	Always pair 慈爱 with a covenant-loyalty gloss (e.g., “神向立约百姓、如今也向外邦人所显的不离弃之爱”) rather than letting the bare compound stand. Never allow 慈爱 to be introduced without first anchoring it to God’s binding self-commitment, not a universal ethical disposition.
外邦人 (Gentiles, baseline reuse — typological, not lexical)	Nineveh is never actually called 外邦人 in the Hebrew text; the term is a teaching bridge, not a translation of a Hebrew word. Overuse risks implying the term appears in Jonah itself.	Use only in curriculum commentary/notes, clearly marked as a cross-reference to the Romans doctrine of the nations, never inserted into the translated narrative text of Jonah itself.
尼尼微 (Nineveh, transliteration)	No inherent weakness, but readers with no ANE historical background may treat Nineveh as a generic “far away foreign place” rather than the specific, historically real imperial capital of Israel’s most feared enemy — flattening the shock of God’s compassion reaching precisely that city.	Introductory note on Nineveh as Assyria’s capital, a real and specifically threatening geopolitical enemy, is required before Jonah 1:2 is taught.

Gap identified: Mandarin has no single term that carries “God’s covenant compassion, freely extended beyond the covenant people, without in any way diminishing his justice.” Each available compound (恩典, 怜悯, 慈爱) captures one facet and risks losing another. Recommended compound strategy: in core doctrinal statements (esp. 4:2, 4:11), use the full triad together rather than any single term alone — “有恩典、有怜悯、不轻易发怒、有丰盛慈爱的神” — so the terms mutually constrain each other’s connotations, following the CUV’s own practice of stacking these attributes.

1.2 Repentance and Divine Mercy

Available Mandarin Terms	Weaknesses	Recommended Strategy
回转/转离 (shuv, turn/repent, new Critical)	Mandarin has no single verb replicating the Hebrew שׁוּב’s ability to describe both a nation’s moral reversal (3:8) and God’s own reversal of stated intent (3:9-10) with the identical root — the wordplay that is the book’s structural spine. Splitting into 回转 (human) and (回心)转意 (divine) breaks the lexical mirror even while preserving sense.	Accept the loss of the wordplay at the word-root level, but preserve it structurally in translation notes and lesson materials: explicitly teach “Nineveh turned (回转), and God turned (转意)” as a deliberate literary pairing, even though the Mandarin words differ. Never let curriculum materials render the human and divine “turning” with unrelated, non-parallel verbs (e.g., “悔改” for humans vs. “改变主意” for God) that would obscure the pairing entirely.
后悔/回心转意 (God’s relenting, new Critical)	后悔 in ordinary Mandarin unambiguously means “to regret [something one now realizes was a mistake]” — the single most dangerous false reading available in the entire book, since it directly implies divine error or fallibility.	Prefer 回心转意 (“to change one’s heart/mind and turn”) as the primary rendering for God’s relenting wherever it can be used without becoming stilted, reserving bare 后悔 only inside a mandatory bracketed clarifying note (never standalone) with a fixed formula: “[神的’回心转意’并非出于错误或后悔的懊悔，而是他信实的性情对尼尼微真实悔改的回应，参《民数记》23:19].” This clarifying formula should be standardized in translation memory so it appears identically at 3:9, 3:10, and 4:2.
信服 (believed, new High)	Distinct from baseline’s 信心 (saving faith with Christ as object), but close enough in surface meaning that learners moving between Jonah and Romans materials may conflate Nineveh’s belief-response with full NT saving faith, or conversely may wrongly discount Nineveh’s belief as “not real faith” since it lacks 信心’s technical weight.	Teach 信服 explicitly as a genuine but preparatory, typological belief-response (belief that God’s word is true, expressed instantly in repentance) — real trust in the message given, but without the fuller post-resurrection content of NT saving faith. Do not use 信心 in Jonah 3:5 even though the underlying trust-dynamic is related.
灭亡 (perish, new High)	Shared vocabulary with John 3:16 is a strength (cross-curriculum consistency), but risks Mandarin readers assuming Jonah 3 is already teaching the NT doctrine of eternal salvation/damnation rather than the temporal, this-city, forty-day threat of physical destruction that is the actual narrative stakes.	Clarify in notes that 3:9’s “perish” is the temporal-historical destruction of the city (paralleling Sodom, 倾覆), while flagging the typological extension to eternal perishing as a distinct teaching point, not a claim already present in the Hebrew text itself.
禁食 (fast, new Medium)	Minor collision with Buddhist/Daoist 斋戒 (dietary/ritual discipline, often oriented toward merit or purification).	Brief note: Ninevite fasting is not merit-generating self-purification but an urgent, sackcloth-and-ashes expression of felt guilt before a personal God who might yet relent — grounded in fear of judgment and hope of mercy, not ritual technique.

Gap identified: No Mandarin verb pair reproduces שׁוּב’s human/divine dual usage on a single root. This is an unfixable lexical gap; the fix must happen at the pedagogical layer (explicit teaching of the parallel), not by forcing an artificial single-root Mandarin coinage that would sound unnatural.

1.3 Human Reluctance versus God’s Universal Love

Available Mandarin Terms	Weaknesses	Recommended Strategy
躲避耶和华 (flee from the LORD’s presence, new Medium-High)	Colloquial Mandarin 躲避 (to avoid/dodge) can read as merely “avoiding an unpleasant task,” understating that Jonah is attempting geographic/covenantal flight from his specific prophetic commission, not just procrastinating.	Pair with explicit narrative framing: Jonah’s flight is a rejection of the mission, immediately and dramatically overruled by God’s control of the sea itself — teach this alongside 1.4 below (Sovereignty over Creation) as two sides of the same irony.
发怒/恼怒 (Jonah’s anger, new Low-Medium)	Same general vocabulary family as anger elsewhere in the book; risk is conflation with God’s righteous 烈怒 (fierce anger) if translators are not careful, implying Jonah’s resentment and God’s justice are morally equivalent categories of “anger.”	Maintain strict terminological separation: 烈怒 reserved for God’s judicial anger against Nineveh’s violence (3:9); 发怒/恼怒 reserved for Jonah’s petty resentment against mercy (4:1, 4:4, 4:9). Never swap.
慈爱 / 怜悯 (see 1.1)	Same terms carrying the doctrine of God’s love toward the nations are, from Jonah’s perspective, the object of his complaint (4:2) — the same Mandarin vocabulary must simultaneously read as (a) God’s genuine, praiseworthy character and (b) the very thing Jonah resents. This dual register is present in the Hebrew too, but Mandarin readers accustomed to religious vocabulary always being praise-toned may not immediately register 4:2 as a complaint quoting a creed sarcastically.	Translation/teaching notes must flag 4:2’s tone explicitly: Jonah is not praising God here but citing God’s own self-revelation almost as an accusation (“I knew you would do this”). The Mandarin rendering of the creedal formula stays reverent and unchanged; the narrative framing around it must carry the irony.

Gap identified: No structural Mandarin gap; this doctrine’s risk is entirely in tone/framing rather than vocabulary, since the same terms serve doctrine 1.1 and this doctrine simultaneously with opposite emotional valence.

1.4 The Sovereignty of God over Creation

Available Mandarin Terms	Weaknesses	Recommended Strategy
安排 (appointed/arranged, new High)	安排 is very low-register, everyday secular Mandarin (“to schedule/arrange,” e.g., 安排会议 “arrange a meeting”). Used four times across fish/plant/worm/wind (1:17; 4:6-8), it risks reading as mere narrative convenience (“and then a fish happened along”) rather than the deliberate, repeated exercise of sovereign command over specific, named creatures that is the book’s structural argument for God’s total dominion.	Reinforce with an explicit verb of divine command where natural (e.g., 神吩咐/差派 as periodic variation, or bracketed emphasis), and require a standing translator/teacher note connecting all four occurrences as a single deliberate pattern, cross-referenced to baseline’s 神的护理 (providence, High risk in Romans 8:28). Recommend NOT varying the base verb 安排 itself (for consistency of the pattern) but supplementing it with framing language each time.
大风/暴风 (great storm, new Medium)	Passive-voice-friendly Mandarin syntax risks losing the causal agency (“there arose a storm” vs. “the LORD hurled a storm”).	Require active construction: 耶和华使海中起了大风 / 耶和华在海中掀起暴风, never a bare passive.
大城/大鱼/大风 (“great” motif, new Medium)	The Hebrew’s deliberate repetition of גדול (“great”) across city/storm/fish/evil/anger/joy is a unifying literary device. Mandarin translators instinctively vary vocabulary for elegance (大, 巨大, 极大, 强烈), which is good general translation practice but destroys this specific device.	Fix a single adjective (大) as the default rendering wherever the גדול motif is in play, accepting slightly repetitive-sounding Mandarin as a deliberate, motivated choice; flag this decision in a standing translator note so future editors do not “improve” the repetition away.
深渊 (the deep/abyss, new Medium)	Low risk, but must not be phrased to suggest an independent chaos-power (a live risk in ANE-adjacent translation generally, though less so in Chinese folk cosmology specifically, which lacks a personified chaos-sea myth as prominent as Mesopotamian Tiamat traditions).	Keep phrasing God-governed (“你的波浪洋海都漫过我” as CUV already frames it) — the deep is Jonah’s affliction, not an autonomous rival force.
抽签 (cast lots, new High)	See §3 below — major crowded-neighborhood risk.	See §3.

Gap identified: No true lexical gap; the risk is entirely that Mandarin’s natural stylistic instincts (vary vocabulary, prefer active-voice economy over repeated command-verbs) work against the Hebrew narrative’s rhetorical strategy. This is a “translator discipline” risk, not a “missing word” risk.

1.5 Jonah as a Sign Foreshadowing Christ’s Resurrection

Available Mandarin Terms	Weaknesses	Recommended Strategy
复活 (resurrection, baseline Critical reuse)	None new; already fenced against 轮回/投胎/还魂 in the baseline. Jonah’s near-death/deliverance narrative must be scrupulously kept a type, never confused with an actual resurrection event itself (Jonah does not die and rise; he is preserved alive and delivered — an important distinction from Christ’s actual death and bodily resurrection).	Mandatory teaching note: Jonah 1:17-2:10 is typologically paired with the resurrection by Christ’s own words (Matthew 12:40), but Jonah himself was preserved alive, not raised from actual death — the type is in the three-day pattern and the “return from the brink of death,” not identical events. Never phrase Jonah’s deliverance using 复活 itself; reserve 复活 strictly for Christ.
阴间 (Sheol, new Critical)	See §3 below — the single highest folk-religion collision risk in the entire book.	See §3 and §5 (ranked risks).
证据/神迹 (sign of Jonah, new Critical)	Two live CUV traditions exist for σημεῖον at Matthew 12:39 (证据 “evidence/proof” vs. the more common NT-wide 神迹 “sign/miracle”), and Mandarin readers accustomed to 神迹 = “miracle” elsewhere in the Gospels may import a wonder-working, repeatable-validation sense at exactly the verse where Christ is refusing to give a repeatable sign and pointing instead to a single, unique, past-future correspondence.	Adopt 证据 for this specific verse per established CUV precedent at Matthew 12:39, with a standing note explaining why: Christ is contrasting this “sign” with the sign-seeking of “this generation” (12:39a) — it is a unique historical proof, not a repeatable wonder on demand. Hold this choice identically wherever the curriculum cites Matthew 12:39-41 or 16:4 / Luke 11:29-32.
三日三夜 (three days and three nights, new Critical)	No inherent Mandarin weakness; risk is purely cross-document consistency — if Jonah materials and Gospel-curriculum materials render this phrase even slightly differently (e.g., 三天三夜 vs. 三日三夜), the typological link Christ himself draws becomes invisible to the Mandarin reader.	Lock 三日三夜 (matching existing CUV phrasing in both books) into translation memory as a fixed, non-variable phrase for both Jonah 1:17/2:1 and Matthew 12:40 without exception.
鱼腹 (belly of the fish, new Medium)	Low risk alone; significant only for cross-book consistency with the tomb-parallel.	Hold identical across both books; do not vary to 鱼的肚子 or similar colloquial paraphrase in either location.

Gap identified: No missing vocabulary; the risk here is entirely doctrinal precision under typological pressure — ensuring the type (Jonah’s preservation) is never collapsed into an actual claim of Jonah’s death-and-resurrection, while still making the intended christological connection vivid.

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2. Missing Vocabulary Summary

Mandarin has no missing vocabulary gap in the sense of “a doctrine with literally no available rendering.” Every load-bearing term in Jonah has at least one workable Mandarin candidate (see 08_core_glossary.md). The genuine gaps identified in this analysis are all of three narrower kinds:

1. Structural/wordplay gaps — Hebrew root-repetition (שׁוב, גדול) that cannot survive translation into a single consistent Mandarin root without sounding unnatural; must be compensated for pedagogically, not lexically (see 1.2, 1.4).
2. Register-mismatch gaps — a Mandarin term exists but sits at the wrong register (安排 too casual/secular for its theological weight; 后悔 actively misleading; 抽签/许愿 carrying an entire folk-ritual system the Hebrew term does not intend).
3. Typological-precision gaps — no vocabulary problem exists, but the conceptual boundary between type and fulfillment (Jonah’s preservation vs. Christ’s actual resurrection) requires constant reinforcement because Mandarin readers will naturally reach for the same vocabulary (复活-adjacent language) for both if not restrained.

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3. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing

The following terms sit inside Mandarin semantic fields heavily populated by competing Buddhist, Daoist, or folk-religious concepts. Each requires an explicit “fence” — a mandatory clarifying note distinguishing the biblical sense from the folk-religious neighbor — before Phase 2 translation proceeds.

Term	Crowded Neighbor(s)	Collision Mechanism	Fence Required
阴间 (Sheol)	地府, 十殿阎罗, 阎王, 轮回 bureaucracy	Chinese folk-Buddhist cosmology has a fully elaborated underworld bureaucracy (ten courts of judgment, presided over by 阎王) through which souls are processed toward punishment or rebirth. 阴间 is the standard Mandarin word for exactly this system.	Every occurrence (Jonah 2:2) requires a note: biblical Sheol is simply “the realm/state of the dead” — a place of separation from the living, not a judicial way-station in a karmic bureaucracy with judges and courts. Escalate to human theologian review before Phase 2, per bible_term_registry.json.
抽签 (cast lots)	求签 (temple fortune-stick divination), routine folk practice at virtually every Chinese temple	抽签/求签 is one of the most common living folk-religious practices in Chinese culture today — worshippers draw a numbered stick to learn a god’s answer to a personal question. Jonah 1:7 risks being read as Scripture endorsing this exact practice.	Note required: this is a one-time narrative description of a Gentile sailors’ practice, through which God sovereignly exposed hidden truth in this specific historical instance — not a normative endorsement of divination for guidance today (cf. baseline’s existing caution against 算卦/占卜 under “prophecy”).
许愿 (vow)	许愿…还愿 temple cycle (make a wish/promise to a deity, then “repay” the vow once granted)	This is a live, transactional, quid-pro-quo folk-religious pattern still widely practiced (e.g., at Buddhist/Daoist temples, Mazu worship). Jonah 1:16’s sailors’ vow risks being read through this exact lens — “they got what they wanted (survival), so now they owe a debt.”	Note required distinguishing the sailors’ covenantal response to witnessing the LORD’s power (worship flowing from awe) from the transactional folk vow-fulfillment cycle (a debt discharged to a bargained-with deity).
慈爱 (hesed)	慈悲 (Buddhist Four Immeasurables — universal, non-relational compassion extended impartially to all sentient beings); 仁 (Confucian cultivated benevolence)	Both neighbors describe compassion as an impersonal disposition (a virtue one cultivates, or a quality automatically radiated by an enlightened being) rather than covenant loyalty freely bound to a specific relationship that can be violated and yet persists.	Every doctrinal occurrence (4:2) requires anchoring to God’s specific covenant self-disclosure (Exodus 34:6-7), not a generic “compassionate nature” gloss.
后悔 (God’s relenting)	Ordinary Mandarin “to regret a mistake”	See §1.2. Single highest false-reading risk of any term outside 阴间.	Mandatory standardized bracketed clarifying note at every occurrence (3:9, 3:10, 4:2); prefer 回心转意 in running text where feasible.
禁食 (fast)	斋戒 (Buddhist/Daoist ritual dietary discipline, often merit-oriented)	Minor risk that fasting reads as merit-generating self-purification technique rather than an urgent expression of guilt/hope before a personal God.	Brief clarifying note recommended (not mandatory) at 3:5.
恶道 (evil way)	道 as cosmic Dao (Daoist metaphysical Way) — already flagged Critical in the baseline under 道成肉身	Lower risk here because 道 in 恶道 clearly functions as ordinary “path/way” in context, but the character’s heavy religious loading in Chinese generally makes reflexive caution worthwhile.	Light clarifying note advisable, not mandatory: 道 here = ordinary conduct/path, unrelated to the cosmic principle sense flagged elsewhere.
敬畏 vs. 惧怕 (reverent fear vs. ordinary terror)	Not a folk-religion collision, but an internal Mandarin register risk: both translate יָרֵא, and careless translators may use either interchangeably.	If flattened to one word throughout, the narrative’s central irony (pagan sailors show more functional reverence, 敬畏, than the fleeing prophet) becomes invisible.	Maintain the distinction rigorously: 惧怕 (1:5, physical terror) vs. 敬畏 (1:9, 1:16, reverential submission).
信服 vs. 信心	Internal Mandarin risk, not folk-religion: near-synonymous vocabulary for “belief”	Learners may either collapse Nineveh’s belief into full NT saving faith or dismiss it as not “real” faith at all.	See §1.2; maintain the terminological distinction and its accompanying explanatory framing.

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4. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Item	Decision	Rationale
יְהוָה (YHWH)	Transliterate: 耶和华 (Yēhéhuá)	Established CUV transliteration; distinct from 神 (title) so the Hebrew narrator’s deliberate alternation between personal name and generic title (1:9-10; 3:3, 3:5, 3:10) remains visible. Never paraphrase as 天 or 老天爷 (baseline prohibition extended).
נִינְוֵה (Nineveh)	Transliterate: 尼尼微	Established CUV form; proper historical place name, no paraphrase possible or desirable.
תַּרְשִׁישׁ (Tarshish)	Transliterate: 他施	Established CUV form; the specific extremity of the destination (opposite direction from Nineveh) is a narrative detail worth preserving as a real, nameable place rather than generic “far away.”
קִיקָיוֹן (the plant)	Transliterate/technical term: 蓖麻 (castor plant)	Established CUV botanical rendering; a paraphrase like “a large leafy plant” would lose the concreteness that matters for the object lesson (a specific, identifiable, fast-growing plant).
מֶלֶךְ נִינְוֵה (king of Nineveh)	Paraphrase/title: 尼尼微王	Standard compound; not a proper name requiring transliteration, but a functional royal title construction already natural in Mandarin.
σημεῖον τοῦ Ἰωνᾶ (sign of Jonah)	Paraphrase, fixed choice: 证据 (not 神迹), per Matthew 12:39 CUV precedent	Transliteration is not applicable (this is a Greek theological phrase, not a proper noun); the paraphrase choice between 证据/神迹 is itself the decision point. 证据 preferred to avoid importing “miracle-on-demand” connotations exactly where Christ is refusing sign-seeking.
שְׁלֹשָׁה יָמִים וּשְׁלֹשָׁה לֵילוֹת (three days and three nights)	Literal calque, fixed: 三日三夜	Not transliteration (no proper noun), but a fixed literal rendering that must not be paraphrased loosely (e.g., “about three days”) since the exact numerical typology is load-bearing for the Christ-connection.
גּוֹרָל (cast lots)	Paraphrase with fencing note: 抽签	No transliteration applicable; paraphrase is unavoidable, but requires the mandatory folk-collision fence (§3) rather than a “cleaner” but less natural alternative like 掷签.
חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם (gracious and merciful, Exodus 34:6-7 quotation)	Full paraphrase, not compressed: 有恩典，有怜悯的神	Resist the temptation to compress into a single adjective; the CUV’s fuller phrasing preserves the creedal, quotation-like character of this formula, which recurs across the OT and should be recognizable to readers encountering it elsewhere (e.g., Exodus, Psalms) in future curricula.
שְׁאוֹל (Sheol)	Paraphrase with mandatory fence, not new coinage: 阴间 (with clarifying note) rather than inventing a novel transliteration or neologism	A novel coinage (e.g., a transliterated “希屋珥”) would be unrecognizable and pastorally useless; the existing CUV word must be retained but is the single most fenced term in this analysis (see §3, §5).

General principle applied: proper nouns (people, places, plants) are transliterated per established CUV precedent without exception; theological technical terms are paraphrased using existing CUV-established vocabulary wherever such precedent exists, with fencing notes carrying the doctrinal precision that the word alone cannot.

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5. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities for Jonah

Ranked by combined severity of doctrinal distortion potential and likelihood of occurrence in ordinary Mandarin reading habits.

1. 阴间 (Sheol, Jonah 2:2) — Critical. Highest folk-cosmology collision in the book: risk of readers importing the entire ten-courts-of-judgment underworld bureaucracy (十殿阎罗) into a text that intends only “the realm of the dead.” Mandatory theologian review before any Phase 2 translation of chapter 2.
2. 后悔 (God’s relenting, 3:9-10; 4:2) — Critical. The single most theologically dangerous false-friend in the book: ordinary Mandarin reads 后悔 as “regretting a mistake,” directly implying divine fallibility (contradicted by Numbers 23:19). Requires a standardized, non-optional clarifying note at every occurrence.
3. 回转/转离 wordplay loss (שׁוב, 3:8-10) — Critical. The book’s doctrinal spine (human turning mirrored by divine turning) cannot survive on a single Mandarin root; without deliberate pedagogical compensation, the central literary/theological argument of chapter 3 becomes invisible to the Mandarin reader.
4. 抽签 (cast lots, 1:7) — High. Live, widely practiced folk-religious parallel (求签) risks the passage being read as tacit endorsement of divination for personal guidance.
5. 许愿 (vow, 1:16) — High. Transactional 许愿…还愿 temple cycle risks recasting the sailors’ worship as a folk-religious debt-discharge rather than awe-driven covenant response.
6. 慈爱 (hesed, 4:2) — High. Risk of collapse into Buddhist 慈悲 (impersonal universal compassion) or Confucian 仁 (cultivated virtue), erasing hesed’s covenant-specific, relationally bound character — precisely the attribute Jonah 4:2 most needs to convey as surprising and particular even while being extended universally.
7. 证据 vs. 神迹 (sign of Jonah, Matthew 12:39-40) — Critical (typological bridge). Choosing the more common 神迹 rather than the CUV’s 证据 at this specific verse would import a “miracle on demand” reading exactly where Christ refuses sign-seeking; inconsistent choice across curriculum materials would also obscure the OT-NT typological link.
8. 安排 as the sovereignty pattern-verb (1:17; 4:6-8) — High. Register mismatch: an everyday, low-stakes Mandarin verb (“to schedule/arrange”) bears the weight of demonstrating God’s total dominion over fish, plant, worm, and wind; without reinforcing framing, the pattern reads as narrative convenience rather than a fourfold theological argument.
9. 信服 vs. 信心 (Nineveh’s belief, 3:5) — High. Risk of cross-curriculum confusion between this typological, preparatory belief-response and the baseline’s fuller technical doctrine of NT saving faith (信心) established in Romans.
10. 惧怕 vs. 敬畏 (fear, 1:5 vs. 1:9/1:16) — High. If flattened to a single Mandarin fear-word, the narrative’s central irony — pagan sailors ultimately displaying more functional reverence than the fleeing Hebrew prophet — becomes invisible to the reader.
11. 灾祸/恶道 wordplay loss (הרעה, 3:8 vs. 3:10) — Medium. The Hebrew’s single root connecting Nineveh’s moral “evil” and God’s judicial “calamity” is invisible across two distinct Mandarin compounds; a real but lower-severity structural loss versus #3 above, since the theological point survives even without the wordplay.
12. 东风 positive-cultural-resonance collision (4:8) — Medium. Classical Chinese poetic tradition treats 东风 (east wind) as a herald of spring/renewal — the opposite valence of its scorching, judgment-adjacent function in Jonah 4:8; a lower-severity risk since the immediate narrative context (withering, distress) largely overrides the cultural association, but a contextual note is still advisable.
13. 倾覆 softening risk (3:4) — Medium. If rendered with a milder verb than the established 倾覆, the dramatic reversal of 3:10 loses its force as a genuine, averted catastrophe rather than a minor course-correction.
14. 复活-adjacent bleed into Jonah’s deliverance narrative (ch. 1-2) — Medium (but doctrinally sensitive given the assigned typology doctrine). Because the whole book is being read through a resurrection-typology lens for this curriculum, there is elevated risk that lesson materials will casually use resurrection-coded language for Jonah’s own preservation-and-deliverance, blurring type and referent. Requires explicit editorial discipline rather than a vocabulary fix.
15. 三日三夜 cross-document drift — Medium-severity but zero-tolerance for occurrence: a purely mechanical consistency risk (any variant spelling/phrasing across Jonah and Matthew materials) rather than a conceptual ambiguity, but ranked here because the typological argument depends entirely on the reader recognizing the exact same phrase in both places.

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6. Summary Recommendations for Phase 2 Handoff

1. Add all Critical- and High-risk new terms identified in 08_core_glossary.md and cross-referenced above to an updated translation_memory.json before Phase 2 begins, with 阴间, 后悔/回心转意, 回转/转离, 有恩典有怜悯的神, 证据/神迹, and 三日三夜 flagged for mandatory human theologian sign-off prior to first use.
2. Standardize the bracketed clarifying-note formula for 后悔/回心转意 across all occurrences (3:9, 3:10, 4:2) so it does not vary lesson-to-lesson.
3. Build a dedicated translator/teacher note bank for the four “wordplay-loss” pairs (שׁוב, גדול, הרעה, and the fear-register split) since none of these can be fixed lexically — all require pedagogical compensation.
4. Lock 三日三夜, 鱼腹, and 证据 (for Matthew 12:39-40 specifically) as fixed, non-variable phrases in translation memory shared between the Jonah and Gospel curricula.
5. Escalate 阴间 (Jonah 2:2) for human theologian review before any segment containing it proceeds through Phase 2, per the severity ranking above.