Linguistic Gap Analysis
Linguistic Gap Analysis — 2 Corinthians (English → Thai)
Purpose
This document executes PRD Phase 1 Step 8 for the 2 Corinthians curriculum: a systematic linguistic gap analysis identifying where Thai lacks native vocabulary for curriculum doctrines, where existing Thai religious vocabulary is “crowded” by Thai Buddhist/folk-religious neighbors that must be actively fenced off, which terms should be transliterated versus paraphrased, and — most importantly for Phase 2 review routing — a ranked list of this specific letter’s highest-risk ambiguities. It extends, and never contradicts, the Romans/Galatians baseline translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json, and is built directly on analysis/08_core_glossary.md and the curriculum-specific assets/bible_term_registry.json already produced for 2 Corinthians.
Scope and Method
Coverage spans all 13 chapters of 2 Corinthians, with the core passage (5:11–21) receiving the deepest verse-by-verse treatment because it carries the letter’s doctrinal center of gravity (reconciliation, new creation, imputation). Every chapter has already been surveyed for load-bearing terms in 08_core_glossary.md; no chapter is silently skipped. Chapters contributing comparatively thin new vocabulary (ch. 2’s transitional travel narrative outside the metaphor clusters treated below; the closing greetings of ch. 13 beyond the terms already logged) are noted here as reviewed, no additional gap items beyond those already logged in 08.
This analysis assumes the Thai reader population described in the baseline: established Protestant congregations fluent in THSV register, alongside first-generation believers from a Buddhist background with low OT narrative literacy and high fluency in Buddhist technical vocabulary (กิเลส, บุญ, กรรม, นิพพาน, วิมุตติ, สติ, ทุกข์). Nearly every gap identified below is a function of that second population’s fluency, not of Thai’s general expressive capacity — Thai is not “poor” in the relevant sense; it is rich with the wrong ready-made answer.
1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| Doctrine | Available Thai Terms | Weaknesses / Collision Risks | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reconciliation with God | การคืนดีกัน (general “making up” between estranged parties); การประนีประนอม (negotiated compromise); การขอขมา (ritual appeasement of an offended party/spirit) | การคืนดีกัน alone is symmetrical/mutual in ordinary usage (two friends “make up”); does not by itself convey that God is the sole initiating and accomplishing agent while humanity’s part is only to receive. การขอขมา wrongly relocates agency to the offending party performing an appeasement rite. | Retain การคืนดีกัน but consistently pair with ทรงกระทำให้ (God-caused causative construction) in every active-verb occurrence, and with the passive imperative จงคืนดีกันกับพระเจ้าเถิด at 5:20 to preserve the “receive, don’t achieve” force. Never allow การขอขมา or การประนีประนอม as glosses even in paraphrase footnotes. |
| New Creation in Christ | การทรงสร้างใหม่ (established, Galatians baseline); การเกิดใหม่ (forbidden — rebirth/reincarnation) | 5:17’s proximity to “in Christ” and the letter’s heavy resurrection-and-renewal argument (ch. 3–5) makes การเกิดใหม่ the single most tempting forbidden substitution in the whole book — more tempting here than at Galatians 6:15 because Paul’s surrounding argument (old/new covenant, dying and rising, tent exchanged for a building) reads even more naturally as a “rebirth” narrative on its surface. | Enforce the existing Critical forbidden-substitution rule without exception; require a mandatory translator note at every occurrence distinguishing a definitive divine re-making event from a repeatable cycle of rebirths. |
| Suffering and Comfort in Ministry | ความทุกข์ยาก (affliction); การหนุนใจ/ความชูใจ (comfort); ทุกข์ (the Buddhist technical term for suffering as an impersonal feature of existence) | ทุกข์ alone, unqualified, invites reading affliction as a universal condition to be transcended through detachment and insight rather than a personal, God-permitted, God-comforted experience. | Use ความทุกข์ยาก (already morphologically distanced from the bare Buddhist technical term ทุกข์) and always pair affliction language with an explicit divine-comfort clause in the same sentence or immediate context, reinforcing the paraklēsis/thlipsis pairing Paul himself makes in 1:3–7. |
| The New Covenant versus the Old | พันธสัญญา (covenant, baseline); ธรรมบัญญัติ (Law); ตัวอักษร (letter, newly fixed) | Risk of two opposite errors: (a) collapsing “letter” into “Law” itself, implying the Mosaic Law was intrinsically deadly rather than good-but-insufficient-without-the-Spirit; (b) flattening the old/new glory contrast (ch. 3) into an undifferentiated single “glory” concept, losing Paul’s fading-versus-permanent structure. | Keep ตัวอักษร (letter) strictly distinct from ธรรมบัญญัติ (Law) in all contexts; require translator notes at 3:6–11 preserving the fading/permanent glory structure rather than a flat comparison. |
| Sincerity and Apostolic Authority | ความจริงใจ (sincerity); เกรงใจ (social deference/face-preservation) | Thai face-and-harmony norms mean direct, transparent self-disclosure (Paul’s repeated appeals to conscience and open dealing, 1:12; 4:2; 5:11) can register in translation as socially blunt or even rude unless explicitly anchored to accountability before God (coram Deo) rather than before the community. | Consistently frame ความจริงใจ as transparency ต่อพระพักตร์พระเจ้า (“before God’s face”), relativizing but not eliminating ordinary Thai social tact, so bluntness reads as integrity rather than discourtesy. |
| Generosity and Grace in Giving | พระคุณ (grace, baseline); ใจกว้าง/ความเอื้อเฟื้อ (generosity); ทำบุญ (Buddhist merit-making almsgiving) | ทำบุญ is the single most fluent, culturally reflexive Thai vocabulary item for “giving religiously” — it is the term an average Thai speaker would reach for first, and it is doctrinally almost the exact inversion of Paul’s argument (grace-motivated response vs. merit-generating act). | Never use ทำบุญ or its cognates for any giving vocabulary in chs. 8–9. Anchor all giving terms (ผู้ให้ด้วยใจยินดี, ความเอื้อเฟื้อ) explicitly back to already-received พระคุณ (8:9; 9:8) in the same clause wherever feasible, following the model already fixed for cheerful_giver. |
| Power in Weakness | ฤทธิ์เดชของพระเจ้า (power of God, baseline); ความอ่อนแอ (weakness); เสียหน้า (loss of face) | Thai honor/face culture treats public admission of weakness as something to be minimized or hidden, not boasted in; a literal rendering of Paul’s paradoxical boast can read as either false modesty or genuine social self-harm rather than a deliberate theological claim. | Require explicit pastoral/translator framing at every occurrence of 12:9–10 clarifying that Paul’s “boast in weakness” is a positive theological claim about where God’s power is displayed, not a culturally strange act of self-degradation to be quietly minimized in translation. |
| Genuine versus False Apostleship | อัครทูต (apostle, baseline); อัครทูตเทียม (false apostles, newly fixed); ทูตสวรรค์ (angel) | Thailand’s religiously pluralistic environment, where multiple teachers/paths are commonly regarded as equally legitimate, can invite a “different but valid ministry style” reading of Paul’s rivals that his sharp เทียม (“counterfeit”) language explicitly forecloses — the same risk already documented for false_gospel/false_brothers in Galatians, now applied to persons rather than teachings. | Maintain เทียม as the required qualifier (never a softer “another kind of” phrasing); preserve Paul’s ironic register for “super-apostles” with visible sarcasm-marking (quotation marks) so the phrase cannot be mistaken for sincere concession. |
2. Missing Vocabulary — Genuine Lexical Gaps
These are concepts for which Thai has no existing native lexical item at all (not even a doctrinally wrong one), requiring compound construction, established Christian-register coinage, or an explanatory translator note rather than a single-word gloss.
| Concept | Gap Type | Resolution Adopted |
|---|---|---|
| Reconciliation as a God-initiated, forensic-relational restoration (not a negotiated truce) | No single native word carries both “restored relationship” and “one party alone does all the work” | Compound construction ทรงกระทำให้คืนดีกัน + mandatory notes; see doctrine matrix above. |
| Ambassador (πρεσβεύω, 5:20) as authorized representative empowered to speak with the sender’s full authority, distinct from a generic messenger | Thai’s diplomatic vocabulary (เอกอัครราชทูต) exists but belongs to a specifically political/royal register | ทูต (ของพระคริสต์) — a lighter-weight noun kept deliberately short of the full state-diplomatic term, avoiding over-politicizing the gospel appeal. |
| Roman military “triumphal procession” (θριαμβεύω, 2:14) | No equivalent Thai civic or religious ceremony | Descriptive paraphrase ทรงนำเราไปในฐานะผู้มีชัย (“leads us as those who have won”) plus mandatory explanatory note; avoid conflating with Thai royal/military parade imagery, which risks unintended political resonance. |
| Nomadic tent-as-temporary-dwelling metaphor for the mortal body (σκῆνος, 5:1, 4) | Tent-dwelling is not part of ordinary Thai lived experience (contrast the Genesis/Exodus wilderness narratives) | เต็นท์ (a recognizable but foreign-flavored loanword) + brief cultural note explaining the temporary-vs-permanent-housing contrast Paul intends. |
| Agricultural “yoke” as a partnership metaphor (ἑτεροζυγέω, 6:14) | Ox-yoke farming is receding from lived experience for increasingly urban Thai audiences | Retained literal image (เข้าเทียมแอก) with a brief explanatory note rather than a modernized substitute metaphor, to preserve the OT background allusion (Deut 22:10). |
| Jewish apocalyptic proper name “Belial” (Βελίαρ, 6:15) | No native equivalent; a proper name, not a concept | Transliteration เบลีอัล + brief identifying gloss (“a name for Satan”). |
| ”Third heaven / paradise” as a unique, sovereignly given visionary experience (12:2, 4) | Thai popular cosmology has richly developed tiered-heaven vocabulary, but it is merit-attained, not sovereignly granted to an individual by grace | Paraphrase สวรรค์ชั้นที่สาม / เมืองบรมสุขเกษม + mandatory note distinguishing a unique apostolic experience from a generally attainable cosmic tier (see §4 below — this item is both a missing-vocabulary gap and a crowded-neighborhood risk simultaneously). |
| OT betrothal/covenant-jealousy background for “godly jealousy” (ζῆλος θεοῦ, 11:2) | Thai has words for romantic jealousy but no established covenant-marriage-to-God frame | ความหวงแหนอย่างพระเจ้า + mandatory OT betrothal-background note. |
| ”Holy kiss” (φίλημα ἅγιον, 13:12) as a literal first-century greeting custom | Physical kissing is not a Thai greeting norm (the ไหว้ is) | Literal translation จุมพิตอันบริสุทธิ์ retained + cultural-adaptation note teaching the underlying command (warm unifying affection) rather than prescribing kissing as a Thai behavioral practice. |
3. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods Requiring Fencing
These are the inverse problem: Thai has an existing, fluent, doctrinally-loaded term that is the linguistically natural choice but must be actively excluded because it imports a rival theological framework. This is the highest-value section of this analysis for Phase 2 quality control, since these are precisely the errors a fluent native speaker might introduce without noticing anything wrong.
| Doctrinal Term | Crowding Neighbor | Why It Feels Natural | Fencing Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grace in giving / cheerful giver (8:1–9; 9:7) | ทำบุญ (Buddhist merit-almsgiving) | Giving to religious causes is the single most common referent of ทำบุญ in everyday Thai speech; it is the reflexive vocabulary choice for “giving religiously.” | Never ทำบุญ or any of its cognates (บุญกุศล, การทำบุญ) for any giving vocabulary; anchor every giving term to already-received พระคุณ. |
| New creation (5:17) | การเกิดใหม่ (rebirth/reincarnation) | “New creation… in Christ” surface-reads as “a new birth” even more naturally than “resurrection” does. | Absolute forbidden-substitution rule (already Critical baseline-wide); mandatory translator note at every occurrence. |
| Flesh, technical moral-conflict and evaluative senses (5:16; 10:4) | กิเลส (Buddhist defilements) | กิเลส is the precise, fluent Thai Buddhist technical term for exactly the disordered desires/worldly-standard evaluations Paul describes. | Never กิเลส as primary gloss; เนื้อหนัง required throughout, with mandatory per-occurrence sense-tagging (see §5). |
| Sowing and reaping (9:6) | กฎแห่งกรรม / “ทำดีได้ดี ทำชั่วได้ชั่ว” | Structurally near-identical folk-Buddhist proverb, taught from primary school; and uniquely for this letter, the topic itself (material giving and receiving) is exactly the domain where Thai hearers reflexively reach for the karma frame — arguably an even tighter collision than Galatians 6:7–8’s occurrence of the same forbidden substitution. | พระเจ้า must remain the explicit grammatical subject of the giving/supplying action throughout 9:6–11; never compress into an impersonal “you reap what you sow” formula. |
| Judgment seat of Christ (5:10) | พญายมราช (Phaya Yommaraj, the folk-Buddhist lord of death who weighs deeds to determine rebirth) | Both concern post-mortem tribunal evaluation of one’s deeds — the surface parallel is exact. | Mandatory translator note: believers appearing at this tribunal are already secure in salvation by grace; the evaluation concerns reward/loss for ministry, not salvation status; the judge is Christ personally, not an impersonal cosmic ledger-keeper. |
| Third heaven / paradise (12:2, 4) | The six deva-realms of popular Thai Buddhist cosmology, attained by merit | Both describe tiered heavenly realms. | Note clarifying Paul’s experience is a unique, sovereignly-given vision of the one God’s presence, not a merit-attained cosmic tier open to any sufficiently virtuous person. |
| Reconciliation (5:18–20) | การขอขมา (ritual appeasement of an offended power/spirit) | Both describe restoring a broken relationship with an offended party. | Never การขอขมา; God alone is the reconciling agent; humanity’s role is to receive, not appease. |
| Conscience (5:11) | สติ (mindfulness/present-moment attentiveness) | Both name an inner faculty of self-monitoring. | Anchor จิตสำนึก explicitly as a faculty accountable to a personal God, not generic non-judgmental self-observation. |
| Examine yourselves (13:5) | Vipassanā-style introspective self-observation practice | Both involve turning inward to assess one’s own state. | Anchor explicitly to “in the faith” (a relational/doctrinal test of standing in Christ), never a detached mindfulness exercise. |
| Fear of the Lord (5:11) | เกรงใจ (social deference) / เกรงกลัวผี (fear of a capricious spirit) | Both involve “fear/deference” vocabulary already in active daily use. | Anchor as reverential moral accountability before Christ the coming Judge — exceeding ordinary social politeness and distinct from animistic spirit-fear. |
| Temple of the living God (6:16) | วัด (Buddhist temple compound) | “Dwelling-place for divine presence” is semantically closer to วัด than the baseline’s general “assembly” sense of church is. | วิหาร required, never วัด; this collision is sharper than the baseline’s general church caution and must be flagged accordingly. |
| Separate yourselves (6:17) | บวช (entering Buddhist monkhood; monastic renunciation of ordinary family/social life) | Both describe a decisive act of setting oneself apart from ordinary worldly involvement. | Teach explicitly as moral/relational distinction within continued worldly engagement, not withdrawal from it. |
| Fragrance of Christ (2:14–16) | ธูป (incense offered at shrines/Buddha images) | Both involve devotional aroma-imagery. | Note clarifying this is Paul’s own metaphor from ancient sacrifice/triumph imagery, not an endorsement of incense-offering ritual. |
| Power in weakness (12:9–10) | เสียหน้า (loss of face) as a purely negative social category | Publicly displaying insufficiency is coded negatively in Thai social norms. | Explicit pastoral framing that this is a positive theological claim about where divine power is displayed, not a shameful admission to be minimized. |
| Christ in you (13:5) | Non-dual/atman-Brahman self-merger frameworks present in the wider Thai religious environment (Brahmanic-Hindu layer) | Both describe an intimate union of the divine and the human self. | Teach as personal, relational indwelling of a distinct divine Person, preserving the Creator–creature distinction; never a dissolving of personal identity into the divine. |
4. One-to-Many and Many-to-One Mapping Risks
Beyond simple missing-vocabulary and crowded-neighborhood problems, 2 Corinthians raises two structural mapping risks between Greek and Thai that require explicit translator training rather than a single fixed lexical choice:
One Greek word → two required Thai words (disambiguation-by-splitting). ἁπλότης occurs at both 1:12 (rendered “sincerity,” ความจริงใจ) and 8:2; 9:11, 13 (“generosity/liberality,” ใจกว้าง/ความเอื้อเฟื้อ). A single Thai gloss cannot serve both contexts without either sounding odd in the ministry-integrity passages or losing the giving-specific nuance in chs. 8–9. Each occurrence must be sense-tagged in the segment cache at the point of translation, following the same pattern already required for the baseline’s context-sensitive “called” entry.
One Thai word → three distinct Greek senses (disambiguation-by-tagging, not splitting). เนื้อหนัง (flesh) must correctly render three distinct senses within this single letter alone: the technical moral-conflict sense already fixed Critical by the Galatians baseline (not itself heavily present in 2 Corinthians but governing translator expectations), the evaluative/epistemological sense at 5:16 (“according to the flesh” as a worldly standard of judgment), the literal-bodily sense at 12:7 (“thorn in the flesh”), and the general contrast-with-divine-power sense at 10:4 (“weapons not of the flesh”). Unlike ἁπλότης, this is NOT resolved by using different Thai words (the baseline correctly requires เนื้อหนัง throughout to avoid inconsistency and to avoid the กิเลส collision at 5:16/10:4 in particular) — it is resolved by mandatory per-occurrence sense-tagging in the segment cache so that back-translation reviewers and footnote-writers know which sense is active, without changing the surface Thai text.
Number-neutral nouns. As already documented in the Galatians baseline for “seed of Abraham,” Thai nouns do not inflect for grammatical number. This recurs at a lower-stakes level in 2 Corinthians at 5:19’s “trespasses” (παραπτώματα, plural) versus 5:21’s “sin” (ἁμαρτίαν, singular collective) — the Thai การล่วงละเมิด and บาป do not themselves mark this number distinction, but because both nouns already carry distinct senses (specific transgressive missteps vs. general sin-nature) the doctrinal point survives on lexical choice alone without requiring the explicit added-wording strategy that Galatians 3:16 required.
5. Transliteration versus Paraphrase Decisions
Following the baseline’s established principle — proper names transliterate into fixed Thai Bible forms; theological technical vocabulary is generally paraphrased into existing (or newly-coined-but-glossary-fixed) Thai Christian register rather than transliterated, with transliteration reserved for cases where paraphrase itself would create or fail to prevent a doctrinal collision (e.g., Messiah/พระเมสสิยาห์ in the baseline) — 2 Corinthians presents the following decisions:
| Term | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Corinth, Paul, Titus, Macedonia, Achaia (proper names) | Transliterate to established Thai Bible forms | Standard convention; no doctrinal content to paraphrase. |
| Belial (6:15) | Transliterate (เบลีอัล) + gloss | A proper name with no Thai conceptual equivalent; paraphrasing would require inventing a description, losing the intertextual link to Jewish apocalyptic literature. |
| Paradise (12:4, παράδεισος) | Paraphrase (เมืองบรมสุขเกษม / สวรรค์ชั้นที่สาม), not transliterate | An untransliterated loan (“paราไดซ์”) would sound like a foreign import devoid of theological content to a Thai reader; paraphrase using existing (if collision-risky — see §3) Thai cosmological vocabulary, fenced with a mandatory note, communicates far more content than a bare transliteration would, despite the collision risk. |
| Ambassador (5:20, πρεσβεύω) | Paraphrase (ทูต), not the full diplomatic transliteration/loan register (เอกอัครราชทูต) | A full state-diplomatic term would over-politicize a relational, spiritual appeal; a lighter native noun retains delegated-authority sense without the political register. |
| Arrabōn / guarantee-deposit (1:22; 5:5) | Paraphrase using the existing Thai commercial term มัดจำ, not a Greek transliteration | มัดจำ is a genuinely well-understood native concept (a deposit securing a future transaction) and communicates the “pledge of future completion” sense more naturally than any transliteration could, provided the relational (not merely transactional) framing is added in context. |
| Reconciliation / katallagē (5:18-20) | Paraphrase (การคืนดีกัน + causative constructions), not transliteration | Thai already possesses adequate native relational vocabulary once properly fenced (see §3); transliterating a Greek theological term here would strip the passage of its relational immediacy for no doctrinal gain, unlike, e.g., “Messiah,” where paraphrase itself was the collision risk. |
| New creation, flesh, freedom, resurrection, grace (recurring baseline/Galatians terms) | Continue established paraphrase renderings exactly as fixed | Consistency rule; these are not new decisions for this letter but reaffirmed inheritances. |
| Super-apostles (11:5; 12:11, ironic) | Paraphrase with typographic sarcasm-marking (quotation marks around “อัครทูตชั้นเยี่ยม”) | Neither transliteration nor a plain paraphrase alone preserves Paul’s irony; Thai lacks a grammatical mood-marker for sarcasm, so an orthographic convention is required as a translation-strategy decision in its own right. |
General rule for Phase 2: default to paraphrase using established or newly-glossary-fixed Thai Christian vocabulary; reserve transliteration for (a) proper names, (b) cases with no Thai conceptual equivalent whatsoever (Belial), and (c) cases — none newly arising in 2 Corinthians beyond the inherited Messiah/Christ/Jesus set — where paraphrase itself would be the doctrinal hazard.
6. Structural and Pragmatic Gaps (Beyond Single-Term Vocabulary)
Two non-lexical gaps recur across this letter and deserve explicit note for Phase 2 translator training, since they will not be caught by a term-by-term glossary check alone:
-
Honorific consistency for newly introduced divine-action verbs. The established ทรง/พระ honorific construction must be extended consistently to every new divine-action verb this letter introduces: ทรงกระทำให้คืนดีกัน (reconciled), ทรงประทับตราไว้ (sealed), พระเจ้าทรงกระทำให้พระองค์เป็นบาป (made him to be sin), ทรงเปลี่ยนแปลง (transformed). Segment-level review must verify the honorific marker is present on every such verb, not merely on the already-fixed baseline set (ทรงเรียก, ทรงเลือก, etc.).
-
Irony and rhetorical bluntness under Thai face-preservation norms. Chapters 10–12 contain Paul’s most direct, even sarcastic, self-defense (“I ask that when I am present I may not have to be as bold…” 10:2; “I have been a fool!” 11:1; the ironic “super-apostles” title; the fool’s-speech boasting catalog). Thai communicative norms strongly favor indirectness and face-preservation (เกรงใจ), and a fluent, “smoothed” Thai rendering can quietly soften Paul’s confrontational register into something more diplomatically acceptable but doctrinally weaker — the same risk already flagged in the Galatians baseline for the anathema and public-rebuke passages, now recurring across three consecutive chapters rather than isolated verses. Translators must be instructed that rhetorical directness is to be preserved even where it register as culturally blunt.
7. Ranked List of Highest-Risk Ambiguities in 2 Corinthians
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × probability of an unnoticed, fluent-sounding wrong substitution), for Phase 2 review-routing priority:
- Cheerful giver / generosity in giving (8:1–9:15) — Critical. The single highest Thai-specific risk in this letter: the topic itself (material religious giving) is the exact domain where the fluent, reflexive Thai vocabulary (ทำบุญ) is doctrinally opposite to Paul’s argument, and the risk is compounded across two full chapters rather than isolated verses.
- Sowing and reaping (9:6) — Critical. Near-identical folk-Buddhist proverb structure, occurring inside the same giving context as #1, doubling the collision surface.
- New creation (5:17) — Critical. The single most tempting forbidden-substitution point in the whole book for การเกิดใหม่ (rebirth), given its “in Christ” proximity and the letter’s dying/rising argument throughout ch. 3–5.
- Reconciliation / be reconciled / not counting trespasses (5:18–20) — Critical. The doctrinal center of the core passage; risk of agency-reversal (appeasement-reading) rather than a forbidden single term, making it harder to catch by simple keyword-scanning than #1–#3.
- Made him to be sin / become the righteousness of God (5:21) — Critical. Requires exact forensic directness; a softened rendering (“sin offering,” “punished for sin,” “made righteous gradually”) would silently convert Paul’s sharpest imputation statement in the letter into a different, weaker doctrine.
- The god of this age (4:4) — Critical. Direct test of the baseline’s exclusivity rule for “God”; an unqualified “god”-word here would be read as granting Satan legitimate deity status.
- Flesh, multi-sense collapse (5:16; 10:4; 12:7) — Critical. Not a single wrong-word risk but a sense-collapse risk: three distinct meanings carried by one required Thai word, any of which could silently import the กิเลส self-effort framework if translator sense-tagging is skipped.
- Judgment seat of Christ (5:10) — High. The Phaya Yommaraj collision is exact enough in surface structure that omitting the mandatory note would likely produce a merit-weighing misreading even from an otherwise competent translator.
- False apostles / super-apostles / angel of light (11:4–15; 12:11) — High. Thailand’s religious pluralism specifically invites the “different but equally valid teacher” misreading Paul’s เทียม language forecloses; compounded by the need to preserve irony in the same passages.
- Power in weakness (12:9–10) — High. Not a lexical collision but a cultural-pragmatic one: Thai honor/face norms can cause even an accurate word-for-word translation to be read as inappropriate self-abasement rather than Paul’s intended theological paradox.
- Third heaven / paradise (12:2, 4) — High. Compounds a missing-vocabulary gap with a crowded-neighborhood risk simultaneously (see §2 and §3); requires the heaviest annotation burden of any single phrase in ch. 12.
- Temple of the living God (6:16) — High. Sharper วัด-collision than the baseline’s general “church” caution because “dwelling-place for divine presence” is semantically nearer to a temple compound than “assembly” is.
- Sincerity/generosity disambiguation (ἁπλότης at 1:12 vs. 8:2; 9:11, 13) — Medium-High. Low doctrinal stakes per occurrence, but a missed sense-tag could quietly blur Paul’s integrity-in-ministry argument with his giving argument.
- Boasting, context-sensitive positive/negative (throughout, esp. chs. 10–12) — Medium-High. Requires per-occurrence tagging at a volume (over a dozen occurrences) that raises the probability of an inconsistent Phase 2 rendering even though no single occurrence is as doctrinally severe as items 1–7.
- Fear of the Lord / conscience (5:11) — High. Foundational to the core passage’s opening argument (Paul’s motive for evangelism); risk of quietly downgrading reverential accountability into ordinary social deference (เกรงใจ) or generic mindfulness (สติ).
8. Recommendations for Phase 2
- All Critical-tier items in the ranked list above (§7, items 1–7) require mandatory human theologian review on every occurrence, not merely spot-checking, consistent with the doctrine_risk_registry.json routing convention.
- Items flagged in §4 (one-to-many / many-to-one mappings) require the segment cache to carry an explicit
sense_tagfield for ἁπλότης and for every flesh occurrence, mirroring the pattern already established for the baseline’s “called” entry. - The irony-marking convention for “super-apostles” (quotation-mark equivalent) should be formalized as a reusable Phase 2 markup convention for any future ironic/sarcastic Pauline passage, not treated as a one-off decision.
- Chapters or verse-ranges producing no items beyond those already logged in
08_core_glossary.md(portions of ch. 2’s travel narrative; closing greeting material in ch. 13 beyond terms already fixed) are explicitly confirmed reviewed here with no additional gap items identified, satisfying full-book coverage.
This document must be loaded alongside 08_core_glossary.md, assets/translation_memory.json, and assets/bible_term_registry.json before Phase 2 segment translation begins for 2 Corinthians.