Linguistic Gap Analysis — Ruth (English → Mandarin)

Curriculum: Ruth 1–4 Core passage: Ruth 1:16–17 Doctrines in scope: Hesed (Covenant Loving-kindness); The Kinsman-Redeemer; God’s Providence in Ordinary Life; The Inclusion of Gentiles in God’s Redemptive Plan; Loyalty and Faithfulness; Genealogy Pointing to David and Christ Authority: Baseline Romans translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json govern all overlapping vocabulary. This analysis extends, never contradicts, that authority. Script: Simplified Chinese. Transliteration: Hanyu Pinyin with tone marks. Register: CUV (和合本), Shen edition (神版).

This document executes Phase 1 Step 8 (Linguistic Gap Analysis) for the Ruth curriculum, building directly on 07_semantic_analysis.md (source of term inventory) and 08_core_glossary.md (source of risk-tier assignments). Its purpose is diagnostic: to name why Mandarin lacks, crowds, or mismatches each doctrine’s vocabulary, and to prescribe a translation strategy for Phase 2.

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1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix

For each doctrine: the available Mandarin term(s), the specific linguistic/semantic weakness of the available inventory, and the recommended handling strategy.

1.1 Hesed (Covenant Loving-kindness)

Available Mandarin terms	Weakness	Recommended strategy
恩待 (ēndài, verb) / 慈爱 (cí’ài, noun) — CUV standard	Mandarin has no single lexeme covering hesed’s full semantic range (loyalty + kindness + covenant obligation + free initiative). 恩待 reads as one-directional kindness shown by a superior; 慈爱 reads as generic warm affection/compassion (also used of parental love, Buddhist compassion 慈悲’s near-neighbor). Neither captures the reciprocal, covenant-bonded quality that makes hesed distinct from ordinary kindness.	Split rendering retained (verb vs. noun form per CUV precedent), but every occurrence (1:8; 2:20; 3:10) must carry a teaching gloss: hesed = loyal love that keeps covenant obligations even when not legally required. Explicitly fence off from 恩典 (baseline grace) and from 义气 (honor-code loyalty; see §2.2 below).
义气 (yìqì) — rejected	Wuxia/sworn-brotherhood loyalty owed within a closed, often reciprocal, honor circle (cf. Peach Garden oath, baseline’s 结拜 caution under fellowship).	Reject. Hesed originates in God’s character and is freely extended outward to an outsider (Ruth, a Moabite); 义气 is insider-bound and debt-based.
功德 / 阴德 — rejected (baseline forbidden list)	Merit-accounting; already forbidden for 恩典 in the baseline. Hesed’s “unrequired kindness that exceeds duty” (3:10) risks being read as merit-generating good deeds.	Reject, per baseline Critical forbidden-substitution rule, extended here by analogy.

Gap diagnosis: This is a genuine missing-vocabulary case — no native Mandarin term maps onto hesed’s Hebrew semantic field. The CUV split (恩待/慈爱) is a workable compromise but under-communicates on its own; Phase 2 must budget for a recurring explanatory footnote rather than expect the term to carry doctrinal weight unaided.

1.2 The Kinsman-Redeemer

Available Mandarin terms	Weakness	Recommended strategy
至近的亲属 (zhìjìn de qīnshǔ) — role/title	Purely genealogical-legal phrase; a modern Mandarin reader parses it as “closest relative” with zero redemptive connotation. Unlike English “kinsman-redeemer,” which is itself a technical compound signaling a special office, the Mandarn phrase reads as ordinary kinship vocabulary.	Mandatory compound teaching bridge. Never let 至近的亲属 stand alone; pair with 救赎 (redemption) in the same sentence or footnote at every occurrence (3:9,12–13; 4:1,4,6,8,14), and explicitly typologically bridge to Christ as ultimate Redeemer.
赎 (shú) — verb “to redeem”	Adequately carries “buy back” legal-transaction sense (used in commercial contexts too, e.g. 赎回抵押品, “redeem a pawned item”), so on its own risks reading as a purely commercial/legal transaction rather than a family-preservation act with typological weight.	Retain 赎, but Phase 2 lesson content (not the translation itself) must supply the Torah-law background (Leviticus 25) so the commercial-sounding verb is understood as covenant-family preservation.
救赎 (jiùshú) — existing NT redemption vocabulary (not in Ruth’s text but available as bridge term)	Not present in the Hebrew text of Ruth itself; importing it directly into the translation would be anachronistic/eisegetical.	Use only in teaching notes/footnotes, never in the running translation of Ruth’s narrative text itself. Keep 赎 (bare verb) in-text; reserve 救赎 for doctrine commentary layers.

Gap diagnosis: This is the curriculum’s most severe missing-vocabulary problem. English “kinsman-redeemer” is already a constructed theological compound in the source language; Mandarin has no equivalent single term and must rely on compounding two ordinary words (至近的亲属 + 赎) that individually undersell the doctrine. Recommend treating this as requiring a standing glossary sidebar in every lesson touching Ruth 3–4, not just inline notes.

1.3 God’s Providence in Ordinary Life

Available Mandarin terms	Weakness	Recommended strategy
眷顾 (juàngù) — for paqad, “visited/attended to” (1:6)	Reasonably personal and warm in register; low risk on its own, but sits near the crowded neighborhood of 天意 (impersonal “heaven’s will”) in casual Mandarin discourse about fortunate turns of events.	Retain 眷顾; explicitly fence against 天意 per baseline’s existing providence doctrine caution (already flagged for Romans 8:28) — Ruth 1:6 is in fact the strongest narrative test case for this doctrine in the whole curriculum, since the book’s entire plot of “coincidences” (Ruth gleaning in Boaz’s field, 2:3) depends on paqad being purposeful divine action.
全能者 (Quánnéng Zhě) — for Shaddai (1:20-21)	Lower immediate collision risk than 神的大能 (baseline power_of_god), but still sits in a conceptual neighborhood with wuxia/xianxia fiction’s “the Almighty/all-powerful cultivator” tropes in contemporary usage, which could read as raw power rather than covenant-keeping character exercised in suffering (Naomi’s lament).	Retain 全能者, but teaching notes must anchor it to lament/complaint context (Naomi accuses Shaddai of dealing bitterly with her) rather than triumphalist power display — this is providence experienced through hardship, not despite it.
空空 / 满满 (structural motif, “empty/full”)	No lexical risk; this is a literary-structural gap, not a semantic-collision gap — Mandarin has the vocabulary but the motif (leaving full, returning empty, ch.1, resolved by a grandson in ch.4) is invisible unless flagged as a deliberate literary frame.	Teaching-note requirement, not a translation-choice requirement. Flag the motif explicitly in lesson materials; no special rendering needed.

Gap diagnosis: Providence vocabulary is not missing in Mandarin, but it is crowded — 眷顾, 天意, and 缘分-adjacent fatalistic idioms occupy overlapping conceptual space in ordinary usage. The risk here is drift toward impersonal-fate readings rather than absence of vocabulary.

1.4 The Inclusion of Gentiles in God’s Redemptive Plan

Available Mandarin terms	Weakness	Recommended strategy
外邦人 (wàibāngrén) — BASELINE REUSE	Established, non-pejorative term already vetted in the Romans package. In Ruth, however, the stakes are narratively concrete (a named individual, not an abstract class) and the historical exclusion (Deuteronomy 23:3, Moabites explicitly barred from the assembly) is sharper than the general Romans-context Gentile/Jew distinction.	Reuse baseline term exactly, but elevate risk tier locally to High (vs. baseline Medium) and require the Deuteronomy 23:3 / Chemosh (Numbers 21:29) background be surfaced whenever 外邦人/摩押 appear, so Ruth’s inclusion reads as costly grace, not an easy formality.
国 (guó) — CUV rendering of am (“your people… your nation,” 1:16)	国 primarily denotes a modern political nation-state/country in contemporary Mandarin; a reader could parse Ruth’s vow as a naturalization/citizenship statement rather than a covenantal, familial, and religious re-identification. This is a register mismatch inherited from CUV itself, not a translator error, but it must be actively managed.	Retain CUV’s 国 for textual/citation consistency, but every lesson on 1:16 must explicitly teach that 你的国就是我的国 is inseparable from 你的神就是我的神 — one indivisible covenantal vow, not a two-part statement where the first half is merely political.
摩押 (Móyā) — proper name	No lexical risk, but the silence risk is real: if the Moab background is dropped from teaching, the doctrinal weight of “Gentile inclusion” collapses to a bland multicultural-tolerance reading rather than “a specific historically-excluded, false-god-worshiping people is grafted into the Messianic line.”	Never let 摩押 pass without background note in any lesson on chs. 1, 2, or 4.

Gap diagnosis: No missing vocabulary here — this is purely a fencing problem. The available terms (外邦人, 国, 摩押) are all adequate lexically but need surrounding doctrinal scaffolding or they default to their weaker, more common secular readings (ethnicity-neutral outsider status; political citizenship; a bare place-name).

1.5 Loyalty and Faithfulness

Available Mandarin terms	Weakness	Recommended strategy
回去 (huíqù) for shub	Structural refrain (12+ occurrences in ch. 1) whose prophetic-register meaning (“return/repent to YHWH”) is entirely absent from the plain verb.	Retain 回去 for narrative flow; require a standing teaching note that Ruth’s refusal to 回去 to Moab is simultaneously a positive turning toward Israel’s God — the verb’s “repentance” register must be taught, not translated.
离开 (líkāi) for azab	Same covenantal echo problem as shub: the verb elsewhere describes Israel forsaking YHWH; ordinary Mandarin 离开 is affectively neutral (“to leave/depart”).	Retain; surface the covenantal cross-reference in teaching notes on 1:16 specifically, since this is a [CORE] term.
舍不得离开 (shě bu dé líkāi) for dabaq	A colloquial, emotionally warm phrase (“can’t bear to leave”) that risks reading as sentimental attachment rather than covenant-bonding language (cf. Genesis 2:24 “cleave to his wife,” same root).	Retain for naturalness, but pair with the Genesis 2:24 cross-reference in teaching material so the bond is read as covenant-union vocabulary, not mere emotional reluctance.
愿耶和华在我身上加倍地降罚 (oath formula)	Longest fixed CUV phrase in the glossary; risk is not mistranslation but misregistration — an insufficiently trained reader may hear an oath formula and mentally file it next to 指天为誓 (folk “swearing by Heaven,” an impersonal invocation) rather than recognizing it as invoking the personal, covenant-keeping YHWH by his covenant name.	Retain CUV form exactly; require explicit teaching contrast with 指天为誓 wherever this verse is taught (see High-risk ambiguity #3 below).
相离 (xiāng lí) for parad	Typologically loaded (anticipates Romans 8:35-39 “nothing shall separate”), but the connection is invisible without an explicit cross-reference, since 相离 alone is a plain, low-affect Mandarin verb pair.	Retain; add mandatory cross-reference note to Romans 8:35-39 in any lesson on 1:17, while explicitly cautioning against conflating Ruth’s admirable human vow with God’s unconditional, salvific promise.
大财主 / 贤德的女子 for chayil (Boaz/Ruth)	CUV’s divergent renderings (wealth vs. virtue) sever the Hebrew text’s deliberate lexical pairing of Boaz and Ruth as moral/characterological equals; additionally 贤德 risks collapse into the narrower Confucian domestic-virtue stereotype 贤妻良母 (“virtuous wife, good mother”), which reads Ruth’s chayil as passive domestic docility rather than active, risk-taking valor (crossing ethnic/social boundaries, gleaning alone in a stranger’s field, initiating the threshing-floor request).	Retain CUV’s split rendering (changing established CUV wording is out of scope for this package), but mandatory fencing note: every lesson using either term must state explicitly that both translate the same Hebrew root (חַיִל) and that Ruth’s chayil is bold, active courage, not domestic passivity.

Gap diagnosis: Loyalty/faithfulness vocabulary is lexically available but semantically thin — Mandarin has adequate verbs for the surface actions (going, leaving, clinging, dying, being buried) but none of them independently carry the covenantal register the Hebrew root system encodes through repetition and cross-textual echo. This is a “flattening” gap: the words are there, the theological resonance is not, and must be supplied by teaching material rather than lexical choice.

1.6 Genealogy Pointing to David and Christ

Available Mandarin terms	Weakness	Recommended strategy
后代 (hòudài) for toledot (4:18-22)	Generic “descendants,” loses the technical genealogical-record function toledot carries elsewhere in the Hebrew canon (esp. Genesis’s structuring device); reads as a bare list rather than a theologically purposeful record.	Retain CUV’s contextual rendering; require explicit note bridging forward to 大卫的后裔 (baseline seed_of_david) so Ruth 4’s genealogy is taught as the narrative origin point of a title Romans 1:3 treats as already-established doctrine.
大卫 / 犹大 — BASELINE REUSE proper names	No weakness; established forms.	Reuse exactly; no new decision required.
大卫的后裔 — BASELINE REUSE typological bridge	In Romans this title is deployed retrospectively of an already-completed genealogy; in Ruth it is the seedbed, not yet a title, requiring the translator/teacher to supply the forward link rather than assume the term’s weight is self-evident from Ruth’s text alone (Ruth’s text never uses this phrase; it only supplies the genealogy that later grounds it).	Do not insert 大卫的后裔 into the Ruth 4 translation itself (anachronistic); reserve for teaching notes and lesson framing only, paralleling the redeem/救赎 distinction in §1.2.
产业 (chǎnyè) for nachalah	Concrete ancestral land; risk is conflation with baseline’s spiritual-inheritance metaphor 儿子的名分 (adoption), not lexical absence.	Fence clearly: 产业 = literal land in Ruth; note the forward typological resonance (both are “inheritance” in English) without merging the referents.

Gap diagnosis: No missing vocabulary; the challenge is entirely one of sequencing — Ruth’s text must not be made to say more than it says (no anachronistic insertion of NT titles), while teaching material must say the necessary more that connects Ruth 4 forward to Romans 1:3 and Matthew 1:5.

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2. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods

2.1 Missing Vocabulary (no adequate native Mandarin lexeme exists)

Concept	Nature of the gap	Fence/supply strategy
Hesed	No single Mandarin word spans loyalty + kindness + covenant-obligation + free initiative.	Split rendering (恩待/慈爱) + mandatory recurring gloss; treat as a “concept requiring a paragraph,” not a word.
Kinsman-redeemer (go’el as an office/title)	No compound office-title exists; Mandarin kinship vocabulary is purely descriptive (who is related to whom), with no built-in legal-redemptive function comparable to English’s constructed compound.	Mandatory dual-term bridge (至近的亲属 + 赎) at every occurrence; standing glossary sidebar recommended for Phase 2 lesson templates covering chs. 3–4.
kanaph as a unifying image (wing/garment-corner)	Mandarin’s translation of the single Hebrew root splits into two semantically unrelated words (翅膀 “wings” vs. 衣襟 “garment hem”), destroying the image’s unity across 2:12 and 3:9.	Cannot be fixed lexically without breaking CUV consistency; must be treated as a teaching-only repair — flag explicitly in any lesson using either verse, framed as “the same Hebrew word links these two verses; the Mandarin cannot show this, so I am telling you directly.”

2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (adequate vocabulary exists, but shares space with false-friend concepts)

Mandarin term	Doctrine	Crowding neighbor(s)	Collision risk	Fencing requirement
恩待 / 慈爱	Hesed	义气 (honor-code sworn loyalty); 功德/阴德 (merit accounting, already baseline-forbidden for 恩典)	High	Explicit note every occurrence: hesed is God’s-character-rooted, freely extended to outsiders, not earned/owed within a closed circle.
眷顾	Providence	天意 (impersonal fatalistic “heaven’s intention”); 缘分 (predestined fortuitous connection, folk-Buddhist)	High	Reinforce personal, purposeful divine agency per baseline providence doctrine caution; Ruth 1:6 should be taught as the strongest anti-fatalism case in the curriculum.
全能者	Providence (Shaddai)	Wuxia/xianxia fiction’s “the Almighty” cultivator trope; also adjacent to baseline’s 气/法力 forbidden-substitution zone for divine power generally	Medium	Anchor to lament context (suffering, not triumphant display); never pair with power-display language absent the suffering frame.
国	Gentile Inclusion (am, “your people”)	Modern political nation-state/citizenship discourse	High	Teach as inseparable from the following “your God, my God” clause; never present as a standalone political-naturalization statement.
葬	Loyalty (burial vow)	祭祖 (ancestor veneration ritual)	Medium	Clarify Ruth’s devotion is to Naomi’s God, not Naomi’s ancestors; burial-loyalty ≠ ancestor-worship participation.
贤德的女子 (chayil, Ruth)	Loyalty; Kinsman-Redeemer	贤妻良母 (Confucian domestic-virtue stereotype)	High	Explicit note that chayil denotes active valor/capability (demonstrated in risk-taking across chs. 1–3), not passive domestic docility; pair with Boaz’s 大财主 to restore the lexical link CUV severs.
义 (used generically of Boaz’s righteous character in teaching material, though not a core lexical item of Ruth’s Hebrew text itself)	Kinsman-Redeemer (Boaz’s character)	Confucian Five Constant Virtues’ 义 (baseline Critical caution, already documented for Romans)	Critical (inherited)	If any lesson describes Boaz’s righteous conduct using 义, the baseline’s existing Critical-tier note on 义 vs. Confucian virtue must be applied identically; do not treat Ruth’s narrative setting as exempting this term from the baseline caution.
脱鞋	Kinsman-Redeemer (legal custom)	Deuteronomy 25:7-10 chalitzah shame-ritual (a different, morally loaded custom involving the same physical act)	Medium	Explicit note distinguishing Ruth 4:7-8’s neutral legal-transaction custom from the Deuteronomy shame-ritual for a levir who refuses duty.

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3. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions

Item	Decision	Rationale
YHWH (יהוה)	Transliterate as 耶和华 (Yēhéhuá), fixed CUV form — NOT paraphrase, NOT reuse of baseline 神 or 主	Preserves the OT covenant-name theology as lexically distinct from both generic 神 and NT-specific 主 (kyrios/Christ’s Lordship), per baseline’s own reasoning for reserving 主 to Romans 10:9-style confession. Ruth is saturated with this name (1:6,8,17,20-21; 2:12,20; 3:10,13; 4:11-14) — collapsing it to 神 would erase the personal, covenant-relational register the name carries throughout.
Shaddai (שַׁדַּי)	Paraphrase as 全能者 (Quánnéng Zhě), not transliterated	CUV precedent; a transliteration (“Shaddai”) would be unrecoverable to a Mandarin reader with no Hebrew background, whereas 全能者 preserves the title’s rhetorical force (a power-name invoked in lament).
Proper names (Naomi, Elimelech, Mahlon, Chilion, Orpah, Boaz, Obed, Moab, Bethlehem, Judah, David)	Transliterate, using fixed CUV forms exclusively	No paraphrase option is doctrinally appropriate for proper names; consistency with the baseline’s established name family (David, Judah) is mandatory. Name meanings (e.g., Naomi = “pleasant,” Mahlon = “sickness,” Bethlehem = “house of bread”) are teaching content, never folded into the transliterated name itself.
Kinsman-redeemer (גֹּאֵל)	Paraphrase (至近的亲属 + 赎), not transliterated	No established Mandarin Christian transliteration tradition exists for go’el (unlike Abba, Amen, Hallelujah); paraphrase is the only viable path, but see §1.2 — paraphrase alone under-communicates and must be doctrinally scaffolded.
Self-maledictory oath formula (1:17)	Paraphrase, fixed CUV form (愿耶和华在我身上加倍地降罚), not a literal reconstruction of the Hebrew idiom	A literal rendering of “thus may YHWH do to me, and thus may he add” would be unintelligible/awkward in Mandarin; CUV’s paraphrase preserves the self-imprecatory, YHWH-invoking force while reading naturally.
Hesed (חֶסֶד)	Paraphrase (split: 恩待/慈爱), not transliterated	No transliteration tradition exists in Chinese Bible history for this term (unlike Abba); a Mandarin reader has zero prior exposure to “hesed” as a loanword, so transliteration would communicate nothing without extensive glossing — paraphrase-plus-gloss is more efficient than transliteration-plus-gloss.
Toledot (תּוֹלְדוֹת)	Paraphrase contextually as 后代, not transliterated and not rendered with a technical genealogical-register noun	CUV precedent; a technical rendering would be unnatural in narrative-genealogy context; the loss of toledot’s structuring-device resonance (cf. Genesis) is accepted as a teaching-note responsibility rather than a translation-level fix.
Kanaph (כָּנָף)	Paraphrase, split per CUV (翅膀 / 衣襟) — accepted as an unresolvable translation-level loss	See §2.1; retained for CUV consistency even though it destroys the image’s textual unity; repair deferred entirely to teaching material.

General principle applied: Transliteration is reserved for (a) proper names and (b) the covenant name YHWH, where an established, doctrinally load-bearing CUV form exists. All other doctrine-specific vocabulary (hesed, go’el, oath formula, toledot) is paraphrased, because Mandarin Christian tradition has not developed transliteration conventions for these terms the way it has for Abba/Amen/Hallelujah in the baseline NT package — introducing a new transliteration here would create an unfamiliar loanword with no gloss-supporting tradition, which is worse than a paraphrase requiring explanation.

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4. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities

Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × collision likelihood × silent-failure risk if unaddressed):

1. The Kinsman-Redeemer title (至近的亲属) collapsing to bare kinship vocabulary. Ruth 3:9,12-13; 4:1,4,6,8,14. Risk: a reader/teacher encounters “closest relative” and never connects it to redemption theology at all — the entire doctrine could be silently lost even though every word is “correctly” translated. Highest risk because the failure mode requires no mistranslation, only omission of the bridging note. Mitigation: mandatory standing glossary sidebar, not merely an inline flag.

2. YHWH (耶和华) vs. God (神) vs. Lord (主) boundary confusion. Throughout, esp. 1:6,8,17; 4:11-14. Risk: if a translator or teacher defaults to 神 for convenience, the personal covenant-name register collapses into generic monotheistic-deity language, and Ruth’s oath (1:17) loses its specifically YHWH-invoking force; conversely, if 主 leaks in from NT habit, the OT/NT lexical boundary the baseline itself establishes is breached. Mitigation: explicit cross-check against baseline’s the_lord entry at every occurrence; flag any segment where back-translation returns 神 or 主 for an underlying YHWH occurrence.

3. The self-maledictory oath formula (1:17) misread through 指天为誓 folk-swearing frame. Ruth 1:17 [CORE]. Risk: Mandarin readers’ most available cultural schema for “a person swears a solemn oath invoking a higher power” is the folk idiom 指天为誓 (swearing by an impersonal Heaven) or dramatic oath scenes from historical fiction (e.g., sworn-brotherhood oaths); this schema would read Ruth’s oath as dramatic rhetoric rather than a legally and theologically binding invocation of YHWH’s own judicial character. Because this is the core passage, misreading here compromises the anchor of the entire curriculum. Mitigation: every lesson on 1:17 must include the explicit fencing note distinguishing personal-YHWH-invoking oath from impersonal folk-swearing.

4. “Your people, your God” (1:16) split into two separable clauses via 国. Ruth 1:16 [CORE]. Risk: 国’s modern political-nation-state connotation invites reading Ruth’s vow as a two-step process (first political/national assimilation, then religious conversion) rather than Ruth’s own single, indivisible covenantal declaration. This directly affects how the Inclusion of Gentiles doctrine is taught from the core passage itself. Mitigation: teach 1:16’s two clauses as one grammatical and theological unit; never let curriculum material paraphrase them as sequential steps.

5. Hesed (恩待/慈爱) drifting toward either 义气 (honor-code) or 功德 (merit-accounting) readings. 1:8; 2:20; 3:10. Risk: because Mandarin has no dedicated lexeme, the term is especially vulnerable to reader-supplied folk-conceptual filler from whichever schema is culturally nearest at hand — and because Ruth’s Chinese-context readers are more likely to be shaped by honor/reciprocity and merit frameworks than by Second Temple covenant theology, this drift is the default reading absent active correction. Mitigation: treat hesed as a “taught concept” in every lesson, not a “translated word.”

6. Chayil (贤德的女子 for Ruth) collapsing into 贤妻良母 domestic-virtue stereotype. 3:11 (cf. 2:1 for Boaz). Risk: this specifically under-translates Ruth’s agency — her chayil is demonstrated through boundary-crossing, risk-taking action (foreign widow gleaning alone, initiating the threshing-floor encounter), not domestic docility — and a Confucian-virtue-filtered reading would flatten precisely the character trait the book is holding up as commendable. Ranked below the above because it affects characterization more than core soteriological/covenantal doctrine, but still High because it is a [near-CORE] thematic term (Loyalty and Faithfulness) recurring at a pivotal narrative moment. Mitigation: explicit Boaz/Ruth lexical-pairing note wherever either term appears.

7. Kanaph’s split rendering (翅膀 / 衣襟) severing the 2:12 / 3:9 typological link. 2:12; 3:9. Risk: without explicit flagging, the connection between YHWH’s promised protective “wings” and Boaz’s garment-corner action (the human embodiment of that protection) is entirely invisible in the Mandarin text — a reader of the translation alone has no way to recover it. Ranked below items 1–6 because it is a single cross-reference rather than a whole doctrine’s vocabulary, but the failure mode (total invisibility, not mere weakening) is severe. Mitigation: mandatory joint footnote on both verses.

8. Genealogy (后代, 4:18-22) read as a bare closing list rather than a theologically freighted Messianic-line record. 4:18-22. Risk: without the forward bridge to 大卫的后裔 and Matthew 1:5, a Gentile widow’s inclusion in David’s/Christ’s ancestry — arguably the book’s climactic doctrinal payoff — could be read as incidental genealogical trivia. Mitigation: every lesson on ch. 4’s close must explicitly state the Ruth→Obed→Jesse→David→Christ chain and cite Matthew 1:5’s naming of Ruth.

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5. Summary and Handoff Notes for Phase 2

• No doctrine in this curriculum requires coining an entirely new Mandarin term; all decisions are paraphrase, split-rendering, or baseline-reuse.
• The single largest structural risk is silent doctrinal loss through omission of teaching notes, not mistranslation — several items above (Kinsman-Redeemer, hesed, kanaph, genealogy) are adequately translatable but doctrinally inert without accompanying explanatory material. Phase 2 lesson templates should budget mandatory footnote/sidebar slots for these terms rather than treating the glossary rendering as sufficient on its own.
• All baseline-reuse terms (神, 外邦人, 约, 大卫, 犹大, 大卫的后裔) carry their baseline risk tier forward unless explicitly elevated above (外邦人 and 大卫的后裔 are both elevated to High/emphasized in Ruth relative to their baseline tier, per §1.4 and §1.6).
• This analysis feeds directly into 08_core_glossary.md (already produced) and should inform the doctrine risk registry extension and Phase 2 AI translation requirements documents to follow.