Linguistic Gap Analysis
06 — Linguistic Gap Analysis: Revelation
0. Method and Scope
For each of the nine curriculum doctrines, this analysis asks three questions of the Mandarin lexical field:
- What terms already exist in the target language that a reader might reach for (whether currently approved, baseline-reused, or a live cultural alternative)?
- What is structurally missing — a concept with no pre-existing single-word or short-phrase Mandarin equivalent, requiring a coined or compound phrase?
- Where is the neighborhood crowded — multiple existing Mandarin words compete for the same semantic space, each importing a different, often un-biblical, set of associations that must be fenced off?
Coverage spans the full curriculum doctrine list and is anchored theologically in the core passage (Revelation 21:1-8), but every chapter of Revelation is in scope per the full-book coverage mandate. Chapters not separately discussed below (e.g., portions of chs. 2-3, 6, 8-10 already substantially treated in the Core Glossary and Term Registry) are confirmed reviewed with no additional gap items beyond what those artifacts already record.
1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| Doctrine | Available Mandarin Terms | Weaknesses of Available Terms | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Return and Reign of Christ | 再来 (zàilái, “come again”); 作王 (zuò wáng, “reign as king”); 万王之王、万主之主 (King of kings, Lord of lords) | 再来 alone is theologically thin — it registers as a generic “coming back,” easily confused with the arrival of any dignitary, and carries no built-in sense of climactic, cosmic, judicial return. 作王 risks being read through the lens of dynastic succession (改朝换代) rather than as inheritance-sharing in an already-secured, singular reign. | Use 基督的再来 (Christ’s return) as the fixed doctrinal label, always paired with 万王之王、万主之主 (19:16, Critical, already fixed) at least once per teaching unit to anchor the return in categorical, not merely sequential, kingship. Render 作王 (20:4,6; 22:5) consistently as derivative reign-sharing, never independent authority — see Core Glossary “Reign (with Christ).” |
| The Sovereignty of God over History | 主权 (zhǔquán, “sovereignty”); 神的护理 (God’s providence, baseline High); 天意 (tiānyì, “heaven’s intention” — REJECTED at baseline); 命运 (mìngyùn, “fate” — REJECTED at baseline) | 主权 is a modern political-science loanword (used for national/territorial sovereignty) and can read as abstract state-power language rather than personal divine rule. The baseline’s rejected pair (天意/命运) remains the single greatest attractor risk: Revelation’s seal/trumpet/bowl judgment cycles, read casually, resemble an impersonal unfolding of cosmic fate rather than the personal decree of the Enthroned One. | Do not introduce 主权 as a new standalone doctrinal term; instead consistently anchor sovereignty-over-history language in the already-fixed 宝座 (throne) and 全能者 (Almighty) vocabulary, both of which are inherently personal-agent nouns. Every occurrence of seal/trumpet/bowl judgment sequences must include explicit “the One seated on the throne” framing to block a fatalistic reading. |
| Perseverance and Faithful Witness under Persecution | 忍耐 (rěnnài, “endurance”); 见证 (jiànzhèng, witness, already fixed High); 殉道 (xúndào, “martyrdom”) | 忍耐 alone can be read as stoic self-reliant endurance (a virtue independently prized in both Confucian and Buddhist ascetic traditions) rather than endurance sustained by union with the conquering Lamb. 殉道 (“dying for the Way/faith”) is a natural-sounding compound but risks collapsing 见证 (testimony) into martyrdom as a built-in synonym — exactly the collapse the Term Registry’s “testimony” entry warns against. | Use 忍耐 only in tandem with 得胜 (already fixed High) and always trace the source of endurance to the Lamb’s own victory (12:11), not become self-generated. Reserve 殉道 only for contexts of actual death (e.g. Antipas, 2:13); never use it as a default gloss for 见证/μαρτυρία generally. |
| Judgment of the Wicked and Vindication of the Saints | 审判 (already fixed Medium); 报应 (bàoyìng, karmic retribution — baseline-rejected); 冤屈得雪 / 昭雪 (vindication/exoneration idioms); 阎王审判 (folk underworld-judge trial — must avoid) | The strongest available Mandarin idiom for “vindication” (冤屈得雪, “grievance washed away like snow”) is emotionally resonant but originates in legal-drama/folk-justice narrative conventions (imperial magistrate dramas) rather than covenantal-forensic theology; it risks framing God as a shrewd magistrate correcting a miscarriage of justice rather than the original righteous Judge whose verdict was never in doubt. | Use 昭雪 sparingly and only as a color word inside a sentence already anchored by 审判 and 义 (righteousness); never let it stand alone as the doctrinal label. Explicitly contrast 审判 with 阎王审判 in teaching notes (already flagged in the Term Registry) so learners see the personal, relational, Christ-centered ground of the verdict. |
| The New Heaven and New Earth | 新天新地 (already fixed High); 天堂 (tiāntáng, “heaven/paradise,” popular folk-Christian and folk-religious usage); 极乐世界 (jílè shìjiè, Buddhist Pure Land/“Land of Ultimate Bliss”) | 天堂 is extremely common in colloquial Mandarin (including secular usage, e.g. “it’s paradise here”) and carries no built-in sense of bodily, physical, renewed creation — it defaults to a disembodied, ethereal afterlife image. 极乐世界 is a specific, named Buddhist Pure Land destination reached through devotional practice (Amitabha recitation); using it, even loosely, imports an entirely different soteriological mechanism. | Never substitute 天堂 or 极乐世界 for 新天新地 in any doctrinally load-bearing sentence. 天堂 may appear only in casual asides fully surrounded by clarifying context; teaching materials must state explicitly that this is renewed physical creation (21:1), a place bodies inhabit, not a disembodied spirit-realm. |
| The Church as Bride of Christ | 新妇 (already fixed High); 新娘 (xīnniáng, modern colloquial “bride”); 教会 (already fixed Medium) | 新娘 is the everyday word every Mandarin speaker uses for a real bride at a real wedding; it activates a strong individual, romantic, one-time-event frame (dowry, banquet reciprocity, family-alliance negotiation) that flattens the corporate-covenantal image into contemporary wedding-industry associations. | Retain 新妇 exclusively (per Core Glossary ruling) for the doctrinal image; 新娘 is FORBIDDEN in any Bride-of-Christ context. Teaching notes must state explicitly that “the Bride” = the whole redeemed people collectively, not a symbol for individual believers’ personal romantic relationship with Christ (guard against a popular devotional over-individualization already common in some Chinese Christian bridal-imagery worship songs). |
| Worship of the Lamb | 敬拜 (already fixed Critical); 拜 (bài, generic “worship/pay respects,” extremely broad folk usage); 崇拜 (chóngbài, “adore/worship,” also used for secular hero-worship, e.g. of celebrities) | 拜 alone is the single most crowded semantic neighborhood in the entire curriculum: it covers ancestor veneration (拜祖先), temple worship of any deity (拜佛, 拜关公, 拜妈祖), and everyday courteous greeting-bows, with no built-in exclusivity marker. 崇拜 is used loosely of pop-idol fandom (偶像崇拜, note the shared root with “idol”!) and therefore risks trivializing reverence for the Lamb into celebrity adulation. | 敬拜 remains the fixed, exclusive term (Critical, no substitution). Never use 拜 or 崇拜 as a synonym in any doctrinal sentence about the Lamb, even for stylistic variation. Every occurrence should be paired, at least once per teaching unit, with the text’s own internal warning against misdirected worship (不可敬拜天使, already fixed High) to dramatize the exclusivity the term must carry. |
| Symbolic and Apocalyptic Interpretation | 象征 (xiàngzhēng, “symbol”); 预言 (already fixed Medium); 算命 / 占卜 / 灵签 (fortune-telling, divination, oracle-slip — all baseline/registry-rejected) | Mandarin has strong, well-developed vocabulary for divinatory symbol-reading (算卦, 解签, “interpreting a drawn fortune-slip”) because of the living I Ching/temple-oracle tradition; there is comparatively weaker native vocabulary for revelatory-literary apocalyptic symbolism as a genre (a body of literature using coded imagery to disclose, not predict via technique, future certainties from a sovereign personal God). | Use 象征 freely as a neutral literary-critical term for interpretive method, but never let numeric or symbolic material (144,000; 666; the beasts; the colors) be taught using divinatory-adjacent vocabulary (解签, 算卦, 卦象). Explicitly frame every symbolic image with 启示 (already fixed Medium, “unveiling,” a closed, Christ-given disclosure) as the governing genre-word, not 预兆 (yùzhào, “omen,” a folk-astrological term for a portent to be read). |
| Assurance of God’s Final Victory over Evil | 得胜 (already fixed High); 天命所归 (Mandate-of-Heaven language, baseline-rejected); 龙 (dragon, already fixed Critical — the antagonist, not the assurance-vocabulary itself) | The distinctly Chinese narrative pattern most readily available for “ultimate victory of order over chaos” is the dynastic-cycle expectation (治乱循环, already flagged under baseline “fulfillment of prophecy”) — a recurring pattern in which any current order eventually falls to disorder and a new mandate arises. This is the single strongest available narrative template a Mandarin-speaking reader might unconsciously apply to Revelation’s climax, and it is precisely wrong: Revelation promises a final, non-cyclical, non-repeatable victory. | Every teaching unit on this doctrine must explicitly name and set aside the dynastic-cycle expectation, stating that God’s victory over the dragon/beast/false prophet (19:20; 20:10) is terminal and one-directional, not the next turn of an eternally recurring wheel of order and chaos. Anchor assurance vocabulary in 都成了 (already fixed High, “it is done”) at 21:6, deliberately paired with its 16:17 occurrence, to reinforce finality. |
2. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
2.1 Missing Vocabulary (no ready-made Mandarin equivalent; compound/coinage required)
These concepts have no existing single Mandarin word and must be rendered by compound phrases already proposed in the Core Glossary/Term Registry. Listed here to confirm no shorter native alternative was overlooked in this gap analysis:
| Concept | Gap Description | Confirmed Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Second death (第二次的死) | No existing Mandarin term names a second, final, non-physical death as a category; ordinary 死 (death) is a single, unrepeated biological event in the general lexicon. | Compound phrase retained exactly as fixed; requires explicit teaching that this “second” is sequential-theological, not a literal repeat of the same kind of event as the first. |
| First resurrection (头一次的复活) | Mandarin has no native concept of a sequence of distinct resurrection-events; 复活 in ordinary/folk usage (where it appears at all, chiefly in translated fiction) denotes a single reanimation event, not a staged historical sequence. | Compound phrase retained exactly as fixed; “first” must be glossed every time as sequence, explicitly not cycle — see §4 ranked ambiguities below. |
| Freely / without payment in a soteriological sense (白白地) | Mandarin 白 alone (as in 白吃, “eat without paying,” a mildly negative idiom for freeloading) does not carry positive theological “gift” connotations on its own. | Reduplicated adverbial 白白地 retained exactly as fixed, always co-occurring with 恩典 or 救恩 vocabulary in the same sentence to secure the positive gift-sense over the idiom’s mildly pejorative freeloading undertone. |
| Marriage supper of the Lamb as covenant-consummation (羔羊的婚筵) | No existing Mandarin wedding-vocabulary distinguishes a covenantal consummation banquet from an ordinary wedding banquet (喜宴); 婚筵 alone reads as simply “wedding banquet.” | Retain compound exactly as fixed; teaching notes must state explicitly this is not a cultural wedding-reciprocity event (面子, gift-exchange obligation) but the final union of Christ and his redeemed people. |
| Word of God as a returning-warrior title (神的道) | No existing Mandarin phrase combines “the divine Logos” with “conquering rider” imagery; 道 alone (without 成肉身) is ambiguous between the Christian technical term and the Daoist cosmic principle. | Always pair 神的道 in Revelation 19:13 contexts with an explicit cross-reference to 道成肉身 (already fixed Critical) so the title’s continuity with the Incarnation, not an independent title, is unmistakable. |
| Throne shared singularly by God and the Lamb (神和羔羊的宝座) | Mandarin grammar does not mark singular/plural on nouns; 宝座 alone gives no clue whether one or two thrones are meant. | Teaching materials (not the translated text itself) must supply an explicit note stating “one throne, not two adjacent thrones” at every occurrence (22:1, 3), since the doctrinal point rests on information the Mandarin sentence structure cannot carry unaided. |
2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (multiple competing Mandarin terms, each carrying unwanted baggage)
These are the doctrine-critical concepts where Mandarin’s problem is not scarcity but surplus — several plausible, natural-sounding words compete, each pulling the reader toward a different, non-biblical frame. Fencing strategy is given for each.
| Concept | Competing Terms | Unwanted Associations Per Term | Fencing Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dragon / Satan | 龙 (fixed) vs. 蛟龙, 龙王, 龙的传人 (idiomatic extensions of “dragon” in common speech) | 龙 alone risks activating the entire positive cultural field: imperial legitimacy, national/ethnic self-identification (“descendants of the dragon,” 龙的传人), auspicious rain-and-fortune deity (龙王) folklore, lucky New Year iconography. | Never allow 龙 to appear in a Revelation teaching context without immediate co-occurrence of 魔鬼/撒但/古蛇 in the same sentence or immediately adjacent sentence (per Term Registry ruling); avoid ANY use of common positive-dragon idioms (龙的传人, 望子成龙) even in illustrative analogy, since juxtaposition alone can seem to endorse the positive association by proximity. |
| Worship (of the Lamb/God) | 敬拜 (fixed) vs. 拜 vs. 崇拜 vs. 礻示 (ritual radical, associatively present in many worship-adjacent characters) | 拜 is the default folk-religious multi-object verb (ancestors, city gods, Buddha, kitchen god); 崇拜 doubles as secular celebrity-fandom vocabulary, ironically sharing a root with 偶像 (idol). | 敬拜 is the ONLY approved term (per baseline Critical ruling, reinforced here); 拜/崇拜 are permitted only when explicitly and negatively describing what is forbidden (e.g., glossing 拜偶像的, idolaters) — never as a positive synonym for worship of God/the Lamb. |
| Throne | 宝座 (fixed) vs. 龙椅 (the specific historical “Dragon Throne” of the Chinese emperor) vs. 王位 (royal rank/position, more abstract) | 龙椅 is not merely evocative but a named, specific, historically identifiable seat (in the Forbidden City) — arguably the single most concrete “state throne” image available to a Mandarin reader, and it shares the 龙 root already flagged Critical elsewhere in this same book. | Never use 龙椅 in any context, even negatively-contrastively (the double 龙 association is too dangerous to risk even as a foil); 宝座 stands alone. Teaching notes should state explicitly that God’s throne pre-exists, transcends, and will outlast every human throne including any historical Chinese one, without needing to name 龙椅 to make the point. |
| Heaven / New Creation | 新天新地 (fixed) vs. 天堂 vs. 极乐世界 vs. 仙境 (xiānjìng, a Daoist immortal’s paradise-realm, common in fantasy fiction) | 天堂 defaults to ethereal, disembodied “up there” imagery; 极乐世界 imports the entire Pure Land Buddhist soteriological system (rebirth into Amitabha’s realm through devotional recitation); 仙境 imports a fantasy-fiction immortal’s hidden realm, often morally neutral or whimsical rather than covenantal. | 新天新地 exclusively for the doctrinal label. 天堂 may be used only as a loose colloquial aside never load-bearing for doctrine; 极乐世界 and 仙境 are FORBIDDEN in any Revelation teaching context, full stop — not merely “avoid where possible,” given the specificity of the competing soteriological systems each names. |
| Righteousness / righteous deeds | 义 (fixed Critical) vs. 圣徒所行的义 (fixed Critical, derived) vs. 善行 (shànxíng, “good deeds,” baseline-rejected generically) vs. 功德 (baseline-rejected Critical) | The 19:8 “righteous deeds of the saints” (δικαιώματα) sits exactly at the fault line between forensic-received righteousness and works-righteousness; Mandarin’s most natural gloss for “good deeds performed by a religious person,” 功德, is precisely the forbidden term, and even the more neutral 善行 tends to imply self-generated moral achievement. | Maintain 圣徒所行的义 as a fixed derived compound, never abbreviated to a shorter phrase that might drift toward 善行/功德; every occurrence requires the explicit “fruit-not-root” teaching note already specified in the Term Registry (fruit of an already-justified people, itself divinely granted). |
| Bride | 新妇 (fixed) vs. 新娘 vs. 妻子 (qīzi, “wife,” used once the marriage is consummated in ordinary usage) | 新娘’s romantic-individual, one-day-event framing (see §1 above); 妻子 risks flattening the eschatological bridal image into a literal, ongoing marital-status claim divorced from its symbolic function. | 新妇 exclusively; 新娘/妻子 forbidden as substitutes in doctrinal contexts, permitted only in incidental narrative asides fully clear from context that they are not being used technically. |
| Mark / Seal (allegiance-marking vocabulary cluster) | 印记 (beast’s mark, fixed High) vs. 盖印/受印 (God’s seal, fixed Medium) vs. 印/封印 (scroll seals, fixed Medium) — three distinct doctrinal referents sharing one root character 印 | All three share the same root and a casual reader moving quickly through chs. 5-13 could conflate God’s protective seal, the scroll’s authority-seals, and the beast’s allegiance-mark into one generic “sealing” motif, missing that two are positive/protective and one is a counterfeit condemned. | Maintain the three-way terminological split exactly as already fixed in the Term Registry (印/封印 for scroll seals; 盖印/受印 for God’s seal on believers; 印记 for the beast’s mark) and require a cross-reference note at each occurrence pointing to the other two so learners see the deliberate three-way contrast as a structural feature of the book, not accidental vocabulary variance. |
3. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Term/Phrase | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Alpha and Omega (Ἄλφα, Ὦ) | Transliterate + mandatory paraphrase pairing: 阿拉法,俄梅戛, always immediately paired with 首先的、末后的 / 初,终 | Bare transliteration of Greek letter-names is doctrinally opaque to a Mandarin reader with no Greek-alphabet literacy; the merism’s meaning (total comprehensiveness) must always travel with the transliterated form, never left to stand alone. |
| Armageddon (Ἁρμαγεδών) | Transliterate: 哈米吉多顿, with foregrounded paraphrase framing (“the place of God’s certain final victory”) in teaching material, not in the base text | A proper place-name; paraphrasing it away (e.g., as “the final battlefield”) would lose the text’s own deliberate use of a specific, evocative Hebrew-derived name. Transliteration preserves the name while teaching notes redirect speculative geography toward the theological point. |
| Gog and Magog (Γὼγ, Μαγώγ) | Transliterate: 歌革、玛各, with explicit “symbolic coalition, not a specific modern nation” framing | Same logic as Armageddon: proper names from Ezekiel requiring OT-narrative literacy support, not replaceable by a descriptive paraphrase without losing the intertextual echo the author intends. |
| Hallelujah (Ἁλληλουϊά) | Transliterate: 哈利路亚 (already standardized) | Fixed liturgical exclamation; transliteration preserves its function as a recognizable worship-cry across Christian traditions and languages, matching established CUV/global-Chinese-church practice. |
| Amen (ἀμήν) | Transliterate: 阿们 (already standardized) | Same liturgical-exclamation logic as Hallelujah. |
| Abaddon / Apollyon (9:11, “the angel of the abyss,” named in Hebrew and Greek) | Transliterate with gloss: 亚巴顿(意为”毁灭者”) | A proper name in the source text itself glossed by John for a Greek-only readership (“in Greek his name is Apollyon”); Mandarin should replicate John’s own transliterate-then-gloss pattern rather than only paraphrasing (“the Destroyer”) and losing the proper-name texture. |
| Armor/military technical vocabulary in the battle scenes (16:16; 19:11-21) | Paraphrase, not transliteration | No Greek proper nouns are at stake here; ordinary descriptive Mandarin military vocabulary suffices and no transliteration decision is required. |
| δράκων (dragon) | Paraphrase via existing character, not transliteration — 龙 is a native Chinese character, not a transliteration; flagged here only to confirm this is a paraphrase-collision case (already exhaustively treated above), not a transliteration decision. | No Greek sound needs preserving; the entire risk is that the target-language native word carries unwanted meaning, the opposite problem from an opaque transliteration. |
| 666 / number of the beast | Neither transliterate nor paraphrase — render as Arabic/Chinese numerals with symbolic-code framing: 六百六十六 | This is a number, not a name; render plainly and let teaching notes (not the text) supply the ancient-gematria explanation, resisting any temptation to “explain” the number by substituting a paraphrase like “the number of imperfection” into the base text itself. |
| Titles combining transliterated proper names with descriptive titles (e.g., “Root of David,” “Key of David”) | Paraphrase the descriptive portion; transliterate only the proper name — 大卫的根, 大卫的钥匙 | 大卫 (David) is an established CUV transliteration (baseline-fixed); the surrounding descriptive noun (root, key) is ordinary vocabulary requiring no transliteration decision, only a note about the covenant-inheritance imagery behind “root” and the authority imagery behind “key.” |
4. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × likelihood of misreading given the Mandarin lexical field surveyed above). All items below are Critical or High risk tier and require human theologian review per the escalation rules already established in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md.
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龙 (dragon) as Satan, set against 龙 as China’s foremost positive national/cultural symbol. Highest-ranked in the entire curriculum. No other item in this analysis has an equally severe mismatch between sign and referent — a native reader’s overwhelmingly positive default association for the very same character used, unmodified, for the Bible’s supreme personal evil being. Requires sustained explicit doctrinal framing at every single occurrence (12:3-17; 13:2, 4, 11; 16:13; 20:2), never a single footnote.
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敬拜 (worship) vs. 拜/崇拜 in a culture where multi-object devotional worship (拜) is the religious default. Revelation is a book whose central dramatic tension is rightly directed worship; if the Mandarin verb itself does not carry built-in exclusivity, the entire worship/idolatry contrast structuring chs. 4-5, 13, and 19-22 is at risk of reading as “one devotional object among the acceptable many” rather than the text’s own sharp either/or.
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头一次的复活 / 第二次的死 (first resurrection / second death) against the proximity of reincarnation-cycle vocabulary patterns. The paired “first…second” sequencing language sits dangerously close, in surface grammatical shape, to the way Chinese folk-Buddhist idiom discusses rebirth cycles (this life, the next life, and so on). The doctrinal payload (a linear, twice-occurring, non-cyclical sequence of once-for-all events) is the exact opposite of the cyclical framework the surface grammar might suggest to an unprepared reader.
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义 / 圣徒所行的义 (righteousness / righteous deeds of the saints) against the Confucian virtue-ethics and Buddhist merit-accounting semantic fields simultaneously. This is a double-exposure risk unique to Revelation 19:8: the term must resist collapse into both the Confucian achieved-virtue reading (already flagged Critical at baseline) and the Buddhist merit-transaction reading (功德) at once, in a single verse describing the Bride’s wedding garment.
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宝座 (throne) against 龙椅, the historically specific Chinese imperial Dragon Throne. The risk is compounded because it is a double collision with item #1 above (both share the 龙 root); a careless illustration or analogy invoking the historical Chinese throne to explain God’s throne could inadvertently reactivate the very dragon-association the curriculum must most carefully suppress.
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都成了 (it is done) at 16:17 and 21:6 against 成了/完了 (John 19:30’s “It is finished”). A subtler but doctrinally consequential ambiguity: if translators or teachers casually conflate these two distinct completions (the cross’s atoning work vs. the culmination of judgment/new creation), the deliberate literary parallel Revelation draws between judgment’s completion and re-creation’s completion collapses, and a reader may wrongly imagine the atonement itself is being re-completed at the end of history.
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新天新地 / 新耶路撒冷 (new heaven and new earth / new Jerusalem) against 天堂 and 极乐世界. High risk because 天堂 is not a fringe or archaic word but the single most common everyday Mandarin word for “heaven” — the path of least resistance for any teacher searching for a natural-sounding gloss is exactly the word that erases the doctrine of bodily, physical new creation central to the core passage (21:1-8).
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儿子 (son, covenant-formula) as a grammatically masculine noun applied to all overcomers regardless of sex. Lower doctrinal centrality than items above but a persistent practical-pastoral risk: without the mandated translator note at every occurrence, Mandarin’s lack of gender-neutral inheritance-heir vocabulary could be read (especially by women in the audience) as implicitly excluding them from the inheritance promise of 21:7.
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万国 / 列国 (nations, eschatological) against 外邦人 (Gentiles, baseline-fixed for Romans’ Jew/Gentile contrast). Risk of consistency drift across the curriculum: a translator trained on the Romans baseline might reflexively reach for 外邦人 when encountering τὰ ἔθνη in Revelation 21-22, unintentionally importing an insider/outsider ethnic framing into a passage that is deliberately celebratory and non-contrastive.
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行邪术的 / 拜偶像的 (sorcerers/idolaters, 21:8) against living Chinese folk-religious family practice (符, 巫, 祭祖). Lower on this ranked list only because the ambiguity is more pastoral-sensitivity than lexical-mistranslation risk — the Mandarin terms themselves are doctrinally accurate — but flagged here because careless catechetical framing risks alienating new believers still navigating family ancestor-veneration obligations, requiring native-speaker pastoral review alongside the standard theologian sign-off.
5. Full-Book Coverage Confirmation
Chapters 1, 2-3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8-9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22 have each been reviewed for this gap analysis. Chapters whose vocabulary items are already fully addressed by the doctrine-matrix and crowded-neighborhood entries above (notably chs. 2-3’s letters, chs. 6-10’s seal/trumpet judgment sequence, and ch. 18’s Babylon lament) contribute no additional gap items beyond what is already recorded in the Core Glossary (08) and Term Registry and are noted here as reviewed with no new findings. The core passage (Revelation 21:1-8) supplies the highest concentration of Critical-tier gap items (new heaven/earth, holy city, bride, tabernacle/dwell, first and last, it is done, freely/without payment, inherit, son covenant formula, second death, lake of fire) and remains the theological anchor for prioritizing the ranked ambiguities in §4, consistent with the curriculum’s design.