01 Executive Summary — Song of Solomon (English → Mandarin)

Why it matters

Song of Solomon is Biblical Hebrew love poetry, not Greek epistolary theology — the first non-Romans curriculum built on this Language Package. Its translation risk profile inverts the baseline’s: Romans mainly required fencing abstract doctrinal vocabulary (grace, justification) away from Buddhist/Confucian technical terms; this book requires preserving frank, embodied marital-love language against a Confucian-propriety pull toward euphemism, while simultaneously fencing specific words — jealousy, Sheol, pleasure, desire, seal, bride — against crowded, doctrinally incompatible neighborhoods in modern Mandarin and Chinese folk religion. Get 8:6–7 wrong and the curriculum loses its only explicit reference to God’s own name in the entire book, along with the passage that grounds all five core doctrines.

Key findings

• 49 terms now tracked in the extended translation memory (9 inherited from the Romans baseline, 40 new): 11 Critical + 14 High = 25 terms requiring mandatory human theologian review, 15 Medium (native-speaker review), 9 Low (automated).
• 21 doctrines mapped across the whole book in the doctrine risk registry: 6 Critical + 9 High = 15 doctrines requiring theologian review, 5 Medium, 1 Low — full chapter-by-chapter coverage confirmed in 11_doctrine_analysis.md, with no chapter silently skipped.
• The single highest-stakes rendering in the curriculum is שַׁלְהֶבֶתְיָה (8:6) → 耶和华的烈焰 — the book’s only explicit divine-name occurrence; a generic-intensifier mistranslation would sever marital love’s grounding in God’s own character.
• The single highest reader-shock risk is the sister-bride endearment (4:9–12; 5:1, 我妹子，我新妇) — an ANE poetic convention with no Chinese literary analogue, reading as literal incest without a mandatory note.
• Two terms — 嫉恨 (jealousy) and 阴间 (Sheol) — are established CUV vocabulary that must be kept, yet both default in ordinary Mandarin to meanings that invert or distort the text’s point (sinful envy; folk-underworld judgment courts and reincarnation).

Risks

• Critical, book-specific: sister-bride endearment (incest-taboo collision); jealousy (嫉恨’s negative-envy default); Sheol (阴间’s folk-cosmology saturation); the divine-name flame (8:6); pleasure/desire (7:6, 7:10 — direct collision with Buddhist craving-as-suffering doctrine); bride/bridegroom typology (risk of 冥婚 “ghost marriage” confusion).
• High, structural: the mutual-belonging formula (2:16; 6:3; 7:10) defaulting to Confucian asymmetric marital duty (夫为妻纲) if rendered or taught carelessly; the “wealth cannot buy love” passage (8:7) colliding unremarked with the live custom of 彩礼 (bride-price); the book’s deliberately unresolved ending (8:14) being smoothed into false narrative closure.
• Cross-cutting cultural risk: Confucian propriety norms create constant pressure to euphemize or abstract this book’s frank sensory register — the single most pervasive risk across all eight chapters, not confined to any one verse.

Opportunities

• Chinese classical poetry’s rich tradition of romantic longing/separation (思念, 相思) offers a ready-made register bridge for the Faithfulness and Longing doctrine.
• The traditional Chinese bridal sedan chair (花轿) gives a vivid, immediately legible cultural analogy for the wedding-procession imagery of chapter 3 (with the bridegroom/bride role-reversal explicitly noted).
• Song of Solomon 7:10’s redemptive reversal of Genesis 3:16/4:7’s domination-desire is a uniquely strong, textually-grounded answer to both Confucian-propriety suspicion of desire-language and Buddhist-detachment suspicion of desire itself — a rare single verse capable of addressing two distinct cultural objections at once.

Recommended actions

1. Route all 25 Critical/High terms and 15 Critical/High doctrines through mandatory human theologian review before any Phase 2 segment is marked approved, per assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json and assets/translation_memory.json routing.
2. Enforce the seven mandatory, no-exception footnotes specified in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md (sister-bride, jealousy, Sheol, flame of Yah, delight/pleasure, desire, allegorical bride) at every occurrence, not only where a segment is otherwise flagged.
3. Build a standing curriculum-opening teaching note (introduced in Chapter 1 material) affirming that Scripture itself — not secular culture — sanctions this book’s frank marital vocabulary as canonical and good, to pre-empt euphemistic drift before it starts.
4. Maintain identical phrasing for the mutual-belonging formula (2:16; 6:3; 7:10) and the adjuration refrain (2:7; 3:5; 8:4) across every lesson, per the cross-document consistency rules already proven in the Romans baseline for Romans 1:16-17 and 8:28.