Executive Summary — Luke Translation Requirements (English → Punjabi)

Why it matters

Luke’s Gospel puts Jesus’ universal, boundary-crossing mission to Jew and Gentile, rich and poor, “sinner” and outsider at its center — anchored in the core passage, Luke 4:16-21, where Jesus reads Isaiah 61 in the Nazareth synagogue and declares himself its fulfillment. Punjab’s Sikh-majority, Hindu-minority religious landscape gives several of this Gospel’s own signature terms — mukti/salvation, mammon vs. maya, scripture vs. Granth, paradise vs. swarg, the kingdom “within/among” you — direct, high-consequence collision points with existing devotional vocabulary that the Romans baseline never had to address. Getting this Language Package right is what allows Phase 2 to translate all 24 chapters without quietly re-importing Sikh or Hindu theology into the text through vocabulary that merely sounds familiar.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage confirmed. All 24 chapters of Luke were reviewed chapter-by-chapter; no chapter was silently skipped, and chapters contributing no new vocabulary are explicitly marked as reviewed.
• 28 curriculum doctrines identified (the 8 named doctrines plus 20 supporting doctrines required for full-book coverage): 13 Critical-risk, 13 High-risk, 2 Medium-risk, 0 Low-risk — 26 of 28 doctrines require mandatory human theologian review.
• 101 total glossary terms now govern Phase 2 translation: 44 terms inherited exactly from the Romans baseline, plus 57 new terms this book introduces. Of the full 101-term inventory, 25 are Critical-risk and 34 are High-risk — 59 terms in total requiring theologian-level scrutiny on every occurrence.
• The established Punjabi rendering of “salvation” (ਮੁਕਤੀ) remains the single highest-frequency risk in the whole curriculum, now compounded by its new personal-title form “Savior” (ਮੁਕਤੀਦਾਤਾ, Luke 1:47, 2:11), which inherits the same mandatory Sikh/Christian mukti-distinction gloss requirement.
• Luke introduces genuinely new collision categories absent from Romans: Scripture vs. Guru Granth Sahib (ਗ੍ਰੰਥ), Mammon vs. Maya (ਮਾਇਆ), Paradise vs. Swarg (ਸਵਰਗ), Hades vs. Patal (ਪਾਤਾਲ), and the Kingdom “in your midst” vs. an inward-meditative-realization reading (17:21) — none of which the Romans baseline needed to resolve.

Risks

• Doctrine-substitution risk, not just mistranslation risk. Several Luke-specific terms (Mammon/Maya; Scripture/Granth; Paradise/Swarg) don’t merely risk confusion if mistranslated — the wrong Punjabi word imports an entire competing doctrinal system (cosmic illusion, living-Guru authority, temporary-heaven-before-rebirth) wholesale into the passage.
• Cumulative drift risk on high-frequency, lower-per-verse-stakes terms: ਚੇਲਾ (disciple, etymologically adjacent to ਸਿੱਖ) and ਪਰਮੇਸ਼ੁਰ ਦਾ ਰਾਜ (kingdom of God, with Khalsa Raj political resonance) appear so often across 24 chapters that small, repeated softenings could accumulate into a real theological shift undetected by any single-verse review.
• σῴζω’s deliberate double meaning (healing and salvation in one Greek verb, at 7:50, 8:48, 17:19, 18:42) is easy to flatten into a single Punjabi sense across a long translation project, silently erasing Luke’s own theological wordplay.
• Pastoral-harm risk, not merely doctrinal risk: a literal rendering of the “hate father and mother” idiom (14:26) using ਨਫ਼ਰਤ ਕਰਨਾ could cause genuine relational harm in Punjab’s strong family-honor culture if a translator defaults to literalism under time pressure.

Opportunities

• ਸੰਗਤ, ਅਨੰਦ, and ਦ੍ਰਿਸ਼ਟਾਂਤ are genuine positive bridge words — table fellowship, communal joy, and parable-as-teaching-genre all have natural, non-competing resonance with Sikh devotional and literary practice that translators should use deliberately, not merely permit.
• ਲੋਭ (greed)‘s overlap with the Sikh Panj Vikar gives this curriculum a rare chance to teach comparative ethics explicitly (shared diagnosis of greed as spiritually corrosive) while still correctly distinguishing the mechanism of transformation (the Spirit’s sanctifying work vs. self-conquest of vice).
• Punjab’s own Sikh shaheedi (martyrdom) tradition offers a built-in cultural entry point for teaching the cost of discipleship and the cross (ਸਲੀਬ), provided translators teach it explicitly as comparison rather than assuming equivalence with Christ’s unique atoning death.

Recommended actions

1. Load both the Romans and Luke translation_memory.json files together for every Phase 2 session; treat the Luke file as strictly additive, never overriding an existing Romans rendering.
2. Route all 26 Critical/High-risk doctrines and all 59 Critical/High-risk terms to mandatory human theologian review by default; do not let a Medium/Low classification in an unrelated field downgrade review routing for these items.
3. Enforce the mandatory Sikh/Christian mukti-distinction gloss on every occurrence of both ਮੁਕਤੀ and its new personal-title form ਮੁਕਤੀਦਾਤਾ, and the σῴζω double-meaning translator note on every healing/salvation-verb occurrence, without exception.
4. Fix, once and lock permanently across every lesson, the renderings for Luke 4:16-21 (core passage), 17:21 (Kingdom “in your midst”), 19:10 (mission summary), and 24:47 (Great Commission composite) — these four passages anchor the whole curriculum’s theological consistency.
5. Brief every translator explicitly on the Luke-specific forbidden-substitution list (ਗ੍ਰੰਥ, ਸ਼ਾਸਤਰ, ਮਾਇਆ, ਸਵਰਗ-as-default, ਪਾਤਾਲ, ਜੋਤ, ਨਫ਼ਰਤ ਕਰਨਾ-literal, unqualified ਭੂਤ) before any Phase 2 work begins, since these risks did not exist in the Romans baseline and cannot be caught by baseline-only training.