Linguistic Gap Analysis
Linguistic Gap Analysis — Acts (English → Thai)
0. Purpose and Method
This analysis identifies where the Thai language and Thai religious semantic field either (a) lack a term for a load-bearing Acts doctrine, forcing paraphrase or coinage, or (b) already possess a fluent, well-worn term that sits in a “crowded semantic neighborhood” — close enough to the biblical concept to be tempting, but doctrinally false or distorting, and therefore requiring deliberate fencing (explicit qualification, translator notes, or outright avoidance).
Acts inherits the entire Romans/Galatians baseline term set (see 08_core_glossary.md Part A) without alteration. This document does not re-litigate baseline decisions (grace/บุญ, salvation/นิพพาน, resurrection/เกิดใหม่, etc.); it focuses on:
- The doctrine vocabulary matrix for Acts’ nine assigned doctrines.
- Missing-vocabulary items (no natural Thai equivalent — requires paraphrase/coinage/note).
- Crowded-neighborhood items (a fluent, false-friend Thai term already exists and must be fenced).
- Transliteration-vs-paraphrase decisions for every borderline term newly introduced by Acts.
- A ranked list of the letter’s highest-risk ambiguities, anchored on the core passage (Acts 2:1-41) but drawing on the full book.
- A confirmation that every chapter of Acts (1–28) has been reviewed for linguistic gaps, including chapters contributing no new terms.
All Thai renderings below match 08_core_glossary.md and the Acts additions to bible_term_registry.json exactly. No new renderings are introduced in this document; where a decision point is discussed, the resolution matches the already-recorded term.
1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
| Doctrine | Available Thai Terms | Weaknesses in Available Terms | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Holy Spirit and Pentecost | พระวิญญาณบริสุทธิ์ (baseline, Critical); เต็มด้วยพระวิญญาณบริสุทธิ์ [NEW, Critical]; วันเพ็นเทคอสต์ [NEW, Medium]; ภาษาอื่น [NEW, High]; ของประทานคือพระวิญญาณบริสุทธิ์ [NEW, Medium]; ทรงเทพระวิญญาณของพระองค์ลง [NEW, Medium] | Thai popular religion has a fluent, everyday vocabulary for spirit possession (ผีเข้า, การทรงเจ้า, วิญญาณสิงร่าง) that is structurally the closest available analogy to “being filled with/taken over by a spirit.” Pentecost itself (a Jewish harvest festival) has zero cultural resonance and no felt weight without explanation. “Tongues” risks assimilation to shamanic trance utterance. | Retain the baseline พระวิญญาณบริสุทธิ์ and extend its Critical status to every derived phrase (filled with, gift of, poured out). Never use ผีเข้า/ทรงเจ้า vocabulary. Mandatory translator note at every “filled with the Holy Spirit” occurrence emphasizing willing, personal, purposeful indwelling by the one true God, not involuntary possession. Provide brief harvest-festival background note for Pentecost (comprehension gap, not doctrinal collision). |
| The Gospel to Jews and Gentiles | ข่าวประเสริฐ (baseline, High); คนต่างชาติ (baseline, Medium); พระเจ้าไม่ทรงเลือกที่รักมักที่ชัง [NEW, High]; ความสว่างส่องแก่ชนต่างชาติ [NEW, Medium]; ของแปดเปื้อนหรือไม่สะอาด [NEW, High] | Thai national identity is closely fused with Thai Buddhism; “no ethnic/religious priority” claims can read as an attack on that fusion rather than a theological statement. “Unclean/common” risks collision with Thai folk-animist contamination categories (เสนียดจัญไร) that operate on a different logic (impersonal ritual danger vs. covenantal boundary-marking now fulfilled in Christ). | Keep the baseline’s careful non-nationalistic framing (already established for kingdom_of_god, mission). Present the Cornelius narrative (ch. 10-11) and Peter’s vision explicitly as covenantal-boundary language, with a note distinguishing it from folk-animist “spiritually dangerous object” categories. |
| Repentance and Baptism | กลับใจ / การกลับใจ [NEW, High]; บัพติศมา / รับบัพติศมา [NEW, High]; การทรงยกบาปโทษ [NEW, Critical]; ข้าพเจ้าจะต้องทำอย่างไรจึงจะรอดได้ [NEW, Critical]; บัพติศมาของยอห์น / รับบัพติศมาในพระนามขององค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้าเยซู [NEW, High] | กลับใจ risks collapsing into generic remorse (เสียใจ, สำนึกผิด) or into the Buddhist devotional pattern of confessing a fault before a monk/Buddha image as a self-directed merit-restoration act. บัพติศมา is a safe loanword but risks conflation with รดน้ำมนต์ (monk water-blessing) in casual usage. “Forgiveness of sins” is acutely vulnerable to the pervasive Thai karma-ledger frame (ล้างกรรม, ลบล้างบาปกรรม). | Mandatory translator note anchoring กลับใจ to “turning toward God on the basis of Christ’s death and resurrection” at every occurrence (2:38 in the core passage is the anchor instance). Never let บัพติศมา be explained via รดน้ำมนต์ analogy without an explicit contrast. การทรงยกบาปโทษ must always retain the ทรง- honorific marking divine agency, and must never be paired with กรรม-family vocabulary even in explanatory prose. |
| The Church as Community | คริสตจักร (baseline, Medium); วิสุทธิชน (baseline, Medium); สาวก [NEW, Medium]; การหักขนมปัง [NEW, Medium]; มีทุกสิ่งเป็นของร่วมกัน [NEW, Medium]; การสามัคคีธรรม (baseline, Low); มัคนายก [NEW, Medium]; ผู้ดูแล [NEW, Medium] | สาวก is genuinely shared vocabulary — the standard Thai Buddhist term for a disciple of the Buddha (พระสาวก) — not merely a false friend but an actual overlapping word. การหักขนมปัง risks conflation with Buddhist almsgiving-to-monks merit-transactions (ถวายอาหารพระ) if presented as a generosity/merit act rather than a Christ-commemorating ordinance. มีทุกสิ่งเป็นของร่วมกัน risks conflation with communal monastic property rules (จตุปัจจัยของสงฆ์). | สาวก must never stand alone; always anchor explicitly (สาวกของพระเยซู/พระคริสต์), consistent with the baseline’s caution for บาป as genuinely shared vocabulary. Frame breaking-of-bread and common-ownership passages as voluntary, Spirit-motivated, lay-community practices distinct from institutional monastic economics or merit-transactions. |
| Apostolic Authority and Miracles | อัครทูต (baseline, Medium); หมายสำคัญและการอัศจรรย์ [NEW, Medium]; ในพระนามของพระเยซูคริสต์ [NEW, High]; การวางมือ [NEW, Medium]; เวทมนตร์คาถา / ไสยศาสตร์ [NEW, High]; จับสลาก [NEW, Medium] | This doctrine sits directly beside the largest crowded neighborhood in the whole book: Thai popular religion’s rich, fluent vocabulary of amulets (วัตถุมงคล), spirit-mediums (ร่างทรง), blessing-string-tying (ผูกด้ายมงคล), holy water (น้ำมนต์), and fortune-telling (หมอดู, เซียมซี). Every miracle-adjacent term in Acts has a ready-made folk-religious “cousin” term. | Apply the baseline’s power_of_god fencing (never วัตถุมงคล-style potency) consistently to signs/wonders, name-invocation, and laying-on-of-hands. Preserve — rather than soften — the negative contrast Acts itself draws with sorcery (Simon Magus, Elymas, the Ephesian magic-book burning): these passages are the text’s own polemic against exactly the folk-practice vocabulary that would otherwise be tempting, and should be used as a teaching asset, not smoothed over. |
| Persecution and Bold Witness | พยาน [NEW, High]; ใจกล้า [NEW, High]; คำให้การแก้ต่าง [NEW, Medium]; เอาหินขว้าง [NEW, Low] | ใจกล้า risks being read through Thai honor/face culture (การเสียหน้า/รักษาหน้า) as confrontational face-claiming rather than Spirit-given courage. พยาน risks softening into a subjective “personal testimony of religious experience,” a familiar genre in Thai popular spirituality (spirit-mediums, faith healers) that lacks the eyewitness-legal-testimony weight of the Greek. | Frame ใจกล้า explicitly as Spirit-produced (a fruit of the Spirit’s presence, not innate temperament or social strategy) and พยาน explicitly as formal eyewitness testimony to a historical, bodily-resurrected Christ, not a subjective inner experience report. |
| Conversion of Paul | การทรงสำแดง [NEW, Medium]; บุตรมนุษย์ [NEW, Critical]; พระบุตรของพระเจ้า (baseline, Critical); การทรงเลือก (baseline, High); เกล็ดตาหลุดออกจากตา [NEW, Low]; จากความมืดมาถึงความสว่าง และจากอำนาจของซาตานมาถึงพระเจ้า [NEW, High] | The light/darkness and rescue-from-a-personal-adversary framing of 26:18 sits beside two Buddhist “cousins” simultaneously: enlightenment as self-attained insight (โพธิ, ปัญญา) and the tempter-figure Māra (มาร) operating within a self-liberation cosmology rather than a rescue-by-a-personal-Savior cosmology. | Keep ซาตาน as a transliteration (never มาร) and frame “light” throughout Paul’s conversion narrative as received, not attained. See ranked ambiguities §4 below. |
| Justification apart from the Law | ความชอบธรรม (baseline, Critical); การถูกนับว่าเป็นผู้ชอบธรรม (baseline, Critical); การประพฤติตามธรรมบัญญัติ (baseline, Critical); เสรีภาพ (baseline, Critical); การเข้าสุหนัต (baseline, Medium); คำวินิจฉัยของอัครทูตและผู้ปกครอง [NEW, Medium] | Acts 13, 15 dramatize in narrative form the exact doctrine Galatians argues theologically; the risk is not new vocabulary but continuity failure — a Phase 2 translator working on Acts without cross-loading the Galatians-derived baseline entries could quietly drift toward กรรมดี/บุญ vocabulary for “works of the law” language embedded in narrative dialogue (15:1, 5, 10-11). | Enforce verbatim reuse of the Galatians-derived Critical entries (works_of_the_law, freedom) inside Acts narrative dialogue exactly as recorded; treat Acts 15’s “yoke” language (15:10) as a direct citation-equivalent of Galatians 5:1, requiring the same forbidden-substitution enforcement. |
| The Great Commission Fulfilled | แผ่นดินของพระเจ้า (baseline, Medium); พันธกิจ (baseline, Medium); ความสว่างส่องแก่ชนต่างชาติ [NEW, Medium]; ไม่มีความรอดในผู้ใดอื่นเลย [NEW, Critical] | Structurally low new-vocabulary risk; the risk is thematic/rhetorical — Thailand’s religious pluralism can invite a “the gospel is one good path among several” softening of Acts’ cumulative narrative arc (1:8 → 28:31, “to the ends of the earth,” “unhindered”). | No new term is required; the strategy is narrative-arc preservation — ensure 1:8’s programmatic statement and 28:30-31’s unhindered-proclamation close are rendered with unqualified confidence, matching the exclusivity already established at 4:12. |
2. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
2.1 Missing Vocabulary (no natural Thai equivalent — requires paraphrase, coinage, or explanatory note)
These concepts have no existing Thai word or phrase carrying the needed content; the risk is comprehension failure, not false-friend syncretism.
| Concept | Gap | Strategy Adopted |
|---|---|---|
| Pentecost (วันเพ็นเทคอสต์) | No OT harvest-festival (Feast of Weeks/Shavuot) concept in Thai religious calendar | Transliteration + mandatory background note (see §3) |
| Nazirite vow (คำสัตย์ปฏิญาณแบบนาซีร์) | No OT temporary-consecration-vow category | Descriptive paraphrase + OT background note (Numbers 6) |
| Circumcision (การเข้าสุหนัต) | No circumcision practice in Thai Buddhist or folk tradition | Established descriptive term (reused from baseline) + short explanatory note on OT covenantal meaning |
| Eunuch (ขันที) | Present in Thai/SE Asian royal-court history but with no OT theological (Isaiah 56) association | Established historical term + OT background note |
| Roman citizenship (สัญชาติโรมัน) | No functional Thai-historical analogy to Roman legal-protection citizenship status | Historical/legal descriptive term, presented factually, not as a rights-assertion template (see matrix note on lèse-majesté-sensitive framing) |
| Apostolic decree (คำวินิจฉัยของอัครทูตและผู้ปกครอง) | No single Thai word for a a pastoral-but-authoritative conciliar ruling distinct from law | Multi-word descriptive phrase |
| Hellenists (ชาวยิวที่พูดภาษากรีก) | No single-word Thai equivalent for this diaspora-Jewish linguistic subgroup | Descriptive phrase + brief historical note |
| Deacon/serving tables office (มัคนายก / การปรนนิบัติ) | Loanword-derived office term already exists in Thai Christian usage but has no pre-Christian Thai equivalent | Established Thai Christian loanword-calque |
| Times of refreshing (วาระแห่งความชุ่มชื่นใจ) | No existing Thai eschatological-relief phrase | Descriptive paraphrase; minor risk of a this-worldly-prosperity misreading, flagged Low |
2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (a fluent, tempting Thai term already exists and must be fenced)
These are the inverse problem: too much available vocabulary, all of it doctrinally false or distorting if allowed to substitute.
| Biblical Concept | Crowded Thai Neighbor(s) | Why It Is Tempting | Fencing Strategy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Filled with the Holy Spirit | ผีเข้า, การทรงเจ้า, วิญญาณสิงร่าง (spirit possession/mediumship) | Structurally the closest available Thai idiom for “a spirit takes over a person”; fluent, everyday, immediately understood | Never use; mandatory translator note every occurrence distinguishing willing/personal/purposeful divine indwelling from involuntary possession by an ancestral/nature spirit through a paid medium |
| Tongues / other languages | ภาษาแปลกๆ, ecstatic trance-speech vocabulary from spirit-medium ritual | Surface resemblance to unintelligible trance utterance | Use only established ภาษาอื่น; stress intelligibility and cross-cultural comprehension (2:6-11) as the defining feature |
| The Way (as the Christian movement’s self-designation) | มรรค (the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path) | Etymologically and conceptually the single most natural-sounding Thai equivalent for “a way/path of life” | Never use มรรค; use the non-technical descriptive ทางนั้น |
| Disciples | สาวก / พระสาวก (Buddha’s disciples) | Genuinely shared vocabulary, not merely adjacent | Always anchor explicitly to Christ; never leave สาวก unqualified |
| Forgiveness of sins | ล้างกรรม, ลบล้างบาปกรรม (clearing/offsetting karmic debt) | The karma-ledger frame is the default Thai mental model for any “removal of moral liability” language | Use only การทรงยกบาปโทษ; theologian review flag at every occurrence |
| Repentance | สำนึกผิด, เสียใจ (regret); Buddhist confession/vow-renewal before monk or Buddha image | Both are fluent and superficially similar (a change of heart about wrongdoing) | Mandatory note anchoring กลับใจ to a God-ward reorientation grounded in Christ’s death/resurrection, not private moral self-correction |
| Signs and wonders / name of Jesus invoked / laying on of hands | วัตถุมงคล (amulets), คาถาอาคม (incantations), ร่างทรง’s power-transfer touch, ผูกด้ายมงคล (monk blessing-string) | Thailand’s dense, everyday market of paid spiritual services and objects | Consistent application of the baseline’s power_of_god fencing; frame divine action as personal and relational, never as impersonal potency channeled through formula or object |
| Ascension | Royal apotheosis motifs; a deva’s rising to a heavenly plane | Thai royal-honorific tradition around the monarchy’s death/afterlife provides ready-made ascent imagery | Frame as Christ’s unique, bodily, permanent return to the Father in glorified humanity — a category with no true parallel, not an instance of an existing category |
| Angel of the Lord | เทวดา (a Buddhist-Brahmanic deva) | เทวดา is the reflexive Thai gloss for “a heavenly being” | Never use; ทูตสวรรค์ขององค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้า — a created, subordinate messenger of the one true God, not an independently venerable deity |
| Unknown god (17:23) | Propitiation of unnamed/unidentified spirits (ผีไม่มีชื่อ, unlabeled ศาลพระภูมิ) | The “just in case” propitiation of an unspecified spirit is a live, common Thai practice | Teaching note required distinguishing Paul’s one-time rhetorical bridge from any ongoing validation of unnamed-spirit worship |
| Light / power of Satan (26:18) | โพธิ/ปัญญา (self-attained enlightenment); มาร (Māra) | Both belong to a self-liberation cosmology that superficially resembles rescue-from-darkness language | ซาตาน retained as transliteration (never มาร); “light” framed as received, not attained — see ranked ambiguity #7 below |
| Sorcery / magic condemnation passages | เวทมนตร์คาถา, ไสยศาสตร์ | Here the crowding is the text’s own polemical target, not a translation trap — but careless softening could blur Acts’ own negative judgment | Preserve full negative force of Simon Magus/Elymas/Ephesus narratives; do not euphemize |
3. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Term | Decision | Thai Form | Rationale |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pentecost | Transliterate | วันเพ็นเทคอสต์ | Established Thai Bible Society convention; the underlying concept (Feast of Weeks) cannot be usefully calqued, and transliteration signals “proper noun for a specific historical/liturgical day” rather than inviting a false calque |
| Baptism / baptize | Transliterate (established loanword) | บัพติศมา / รับบัพติศมา | Long-established Thai Christian loanword; paraphrasing (e.g., “water-immersion rite”) would invite conflation with รดน้ำมนต์; the loanword’s very foreignness protects it from that collision |
| Christians | Transliterate | คริสเตียน | Universal Thai usage; paraphrase is unnecessary and would sound stilted; retain explicit Christ-centered content in surrounding teaching text since popular usage sometimes flattens this to “non-Buddhist Westerner” |
| Christ / Messiah | Transliterate (baseline) | พระคริสต์ / พระเมสสิยาห์ | Reused exactly from baseline; transliteration of “Messiah” specifically blocks the tempting calque to พระศรีอริยเมตไตรย |
| Satan | Transliterate | ซาตาน | Blocks the tempting calque to มาร (Māra), which carries an entirely different cosmology (a personification of temptation/death within self-liberation Buddhism rather than a personal, defeated-but-active adversary within a rescue cosmology) |
| Artemis of the Ephesians | Transliterate | อารเทมิส | Proper name of a specific historical deity; no Thai equivalent needed or desired; historical/commercial-religious note recommended, with cautious use as a teaching bridge to shrine-centered commerce |
| Son of Man | Calque | บุตรมนุษย์ | Preserves the Danielic (Dan 7:13-14) exalted-authority title; a looser paraphrase (“a human being,” “the Son”) would erase the OT allusion entirely; requires a background note for readers with low OT literacy |
| Servant of God | Paraphrase | ผู้รับใช้ของพระองค์ | No single Thai word carries the Isaiah Servant-Songs messianic freight; paraphrase plus a note connecting it to Isaiah 52-53 is required so the title is not read as diminishing Christ’s deity |
| The Way | Paraphrase (deliberately non-technical) | ทางนั้น | A calque risk-word (มรรค) is available and must be explicitly avoided; a plain descriptive phrase carries the self-designation without importing a self-attained-liberation framework |
| Filled with the Holy Spirit | Paraphrase (compound, not a single coined word) | เต็มด้วยพระวิญญาณบริสุทธิ์ | A single-word coinage risks either sounding invented (reducing uptake) or accidentally resembling existing possession vocabulary; the transparent compound “full of + the Holy Spirit” keeps the divine Person explicit at every occurrence |
| No other name / call upon the name of the Lord / what must I do to be saved | Paraphrase, fixed formula (not free translation per occurrence) | ไม่มีความรอดในผู้ใดอื่นเลย / ทุกคนที่ร้องออกพระนามขององค์พระผู้เป็นเจ้า / ข้าพเจ้าจะต้องทำอย่างไรจึงจะรอดได้ | These are doctrinally load-bearing formulas quoted or echoed across the curriculum (cf. Romans 10:9-13); fixed-formula treatment (identical wording every time) is required over free paraphrase to preserve cross-document verbatim consistency |
| Roman citizenship | Paraphrase (historical/legal descriptive term) | สัญชาติโรมัน | A modern Thai legal-nationality word is repurposed for a Roman legal status with no exact functional analogy; presented factually as historical narration, not as a template for asserting rights against Thai authority (parallel caution to Romans 13) |
| Eunuch | Established historical term (retain, do not paraphrase further) | ขันที | Already a familiar Thai historical/court term; requires an added note (not a different term) supplying the Isaiah 56 background |
| Casting lots | Paraphrase/established phrase | จับสลาก | Must be explicitly distinguished by surrounding text (not by the term itself, which is neutral) from เสี่ยงเซียมซี/หมอดู-style divination independent of prayer to a sovereign God |
| Magic books burned | Descriptive paraphrase | เผาหนังสือเวทมนตร์คาถา | No single-word Thai term for this specific renunciation act; full descriptive phrase preserves the vividness and totality of the narrative detail |
General principle governing this table: transliteration is preferred wherever (a) an established Thai Bible/Christian loanword already exists (บัพติศมา, คริสเตียน, พระเมสสิยาห์), or (b) a proper name has no theological content to translate (อารเทมิส, ซาตาน as the safe alternative to a calque). Paraphrase is preferred wherever a single Thai word would either (a) already belong to a crowded, false-friend semantic neighborhood (มรรค, กรรม-family words, เทวดา), or (b) simply not exist and coinage would sound artificial. Calque (morpheme-by-morpheme translation, as with บุตรมนุษย์) is reserved for titles where the structure of the original phrase itself carries the doctrinal content that must be visible in Thai.
4. Ranked List of the Highest-Risk Ambiguities in Acts
Ranked by combined severity (doctrinal centrality × cultural collision likelihood). Items 1–4 sit directly inside the core passage (Acts 2:1-41) and therefore carry the highest priority for Phase 2 review calibration.
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“Filled with the Holy Spirit” vs. spirit possession (Acts 2:4, core passage). The single highest-stakes ambiguity in the book. Thai has fluent, everyday vocabulary (ผีเข้า, การทรงเจ้า) for exactly the surface phenomenon being described (a spirit taking over a person, producing altered speech). Without a mandatory note at every occurrence, first-generation readers from a folk-religious background are likely to default to a possession framework. Critical / theologian review mandatory.
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Tongues as intelligible languages vs. ecstatic trance speech (Acts 2:4-11, core passage). The confirming detail that hearers recognized their own native languages (2:6-8, 11) is the doctrinal safeguard against a trance-speech misreading; this detail must never be trimmed or summarized away in any adaptation of the passage. High.
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“Repent and be baptized… for the forgiveness of your sins” (Acts 2:38, core passage) vs. the karma-ledger frame. Two Critical-risk terms converge in a single verse: กลับใจ (repentance, vulnerable to generic-regret reduction) and การทรงยกบาปโทษ (forgiveness, vulnerable to ล้างกรรม-style karma-clearing). Because this is the single most quoted verse of the sermon, an error here propagates across the entire curriculum. Critical / theologian review mandatory.
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“God has made him both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36, core passage) — functional installation vs. ontological origination. ทรงตั้ง (“appointed/installed”) must be read as the public vindication of an eternally true status (resurrection-exaltation), not as the beginning of Christ’s Lordship/Deity — a subtle grammatical-theological trap given Thai’s lack of a perfect/pluperfect distinction that could otherwise carry this nuance implicitly in English. Requires explicit surrounding teaching-note support, not verb choice alone. Critical / theologian review mandatory.
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“Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Acts 2:21, core passage) — cross-document consistency. This Joel 2:32 citation must render identically to the Romans 10:13 baseline rendering. Any drift, even stylistic, breaks the pipeline’s cross-curriculum verbatim-consistency rule and risks readers perceiving two different promises. Critical, mechanical/consistency risk rather than a new syncretism risk.
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“There is no other name” (Acts 4:12) — exclusivity vs. Thai religious pluralism. Thailand’s normal cultural posture treats religious traditions as parallel valid paths; this verse’s unqualified exclusivity is the single most countercultural claim in the book outside the core passage and is highly liable to pastoral softening in oral teaching even when the written translation is accurate. Critical.
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“From darkness to light… from the power of Satan to God” (Acts 26:18) — enlightenment/Māra collision. Two Buddhist-cosmology “cousins” (self-attained enlightenment; Māra as tempter-within-self-liberation) sit beside this single verse simultaneously. Both must be fenced together, since teaching one without the other leaves half the verse vulnerable. High, theologian review flagged.
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“The Way” (Acts 9:2 and throughout) vs. มรรค. Lower per-occurrence doctrinal stakes than items 1-7, but extremely high frequency risk: the term recurs as a casual self-designation across many chapters (9, 19, 22, 24), so a single lapse into a มรรค-adjacent phrasing anywhere would recur silently throughout back-translation. High, frequency-driven.
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“Disciples” (σαθηταί) vs. สาวก (Acts, pervasive). Unlike most items above, this is not a false-friend but a true shared word — the same lexical item names both a follower of Jesus and a follower of the Buddha. This makes it uniquely hard to catch in back-translation review, since the word itself is “correct” and only the missing anchor (สาวกของพระเยซู) prevents the ambiguity. Medium-High, detection-difficulty-driven.
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“Angel of the Lord” vs. เทวดา (recurring, e.g. Acts 5:19; 12:7-11). Because เทวดา is already forbidden as a substitute for “God” in the baseline, translators are alert to it there; the risk here is the opposite direction — using it for a created being feels safer than for God, but still imports an independently-venerable-deity frame foreign to the biblical angel. Medium-High.
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Ascension (Acts 1:9-11) vs. royal apotheosis imagery. Thailand’s own royal-honorific tradition around a monarch’s death and afterlife supplies ready culturally-resonant ascent imagery that could unintentionally “domesticate” this unique Christological event into a familiar category rather than presenting it as sui generis. High.
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“Unknown god” (Acts 17:23) as rhetorical bridge vs. actual syncretism. The single greatest risk of teaching misuse rather than translation misuse: because Paul’s move here is genuinely a missionary bridge-building technique, poorly supervised teaching materials could extrapolate it into validating the “just in case” propitiation of Thailand’s own unnamed or unidentified spirit-shrines. High, pedagogical-framing risk.
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Signs and wonders / name-of-Jesus invocation / laying on of hands (throughout, esp. chs. 3-5, 8, 13, 19) vs. Thailand’s dense amulet/incantation/spirit-medium marketplace. Individually Medium-High risk per baseline analogues (power_of_god), but cumulatively the largest volume of crowded-neighborhood vocabulary in the book, recurring in nearly every miracle narrative. Medium-High, cumulative-volume risk.
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Casting lots (Acts 1:26) vs. divination independent of prayer. Lower doctrinal centrality than the items above but a clean, easily-overlooked collision with the ubiquitous Thai practice of temple fortune-telling (เสี่ยงเซียมซี); requires only a brief contextual note but is easy to skip since the term itself (จับสลาก) is neutral. Medium.
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“Eutychus revived” (Acts 20:9-10) vs. the dedicated resurrection term. A structural, not cultural, risk: if a translator defaults to reusing การเป็นขึ้นจากตาย (reserved exclusively for Christ’s unique resurrection and the eschatological general resurrection) for this temporary this-life revival, the doctrine of the singularity of Christ’s resurrection is quietly blurred. Medium, internal-consistency risk.
5. Grammatical and Structural Gaps Relevant to Acts
Beyond lexical choices, the following structural features of Thai interact with Acts’ argument and narrative in ways Phase 2 translators must actively manage:
- No tense marking. Thai verbs do not inflect for tense. Acts’ repeated argument that Christ’s resurrection is a completed, past, historical, once-for-all event (as opposed to Eutychus’s temporary this-life revival, or an ongoing cyclical process) must be carried by explicit time adverbials and by consistently reserving separate vocabulary (การเป็นขึ้นจากตาย vs. ฟื้นขึ้นมามีชีวิต) rather than by verb morphology.
- No grammatical number. As already noted in the baseline for “seed of Abraham,” Thai nouns do not mark singular/plural. This resurfaces mildly in Acts’ universal-scope statements (“all who call,” “everyone who believes,” 2:21; 10:34-35) where the all-inclusiveness must be carried by explicit quantifying words (ทุกคน) rather than left to be inferred.
- Topic-prominent syntax and the ทรง-/พระ- honorific system. Thai regularly permits (and Thai Bible style prefers) the divine agent to be marked honorifically even when placed later in a sentence. This is an asset for preserving God as the explicit grammatical subject of key statements (e.g., “God has made him both Lord and Christ,” 2:36; “God shows no partiality,” 10:34), which must not be allowed to drift into a passive or agentless construction that would obscure divine agency.
- Register layering. The same ทรง-/พระ- honorific register used for divine action is historically also available for royal reference in Thai. As already flagged in the baseline for “Lord,” this creates a persistent low-hum risk across all of Acts’ Christological confessions that the register alone (rather than surrounding content) could be misread as extending royal-court respect rather than asserting unique divine Lordship. This is a background risk to monitor across the whole book, not a single-verse issue.
6. Full-Book Coverage Confirmation
All 28 chapters of Acts were reviewed for linguistic-gap purposes. The following chapters were confirmed to introduce no new terminology or gap risk beyond what is already catalogued above and are noted here explicitly rather than silently omitted:
- Acts 16 (Philippian jailer, Lydia) — no new lexical gap beyond items already catalogued (baptism, what-must-I-do-to-be-saved, Roman citizenship); reviewed and confirmed covered under §1, §3.
- Acts 21 — Nazirite vow and circumcision controversy already catalogued under §2.1/§2.2; remainder of the chapter (temple riot, arrest) introduces no new gap.
- Acts 25 — legal-procedural narrative (Festus, Agrippa) using terms already catalogued (defense/testimony, Roman citizenship); no new gap.
- Acts 27 — shipwreck narrative; providence language already catalogued under the baseline’s providence entry; no new syncretism-specific gap beyond what is noted for casting-lots-adjacent trust-in-divine-guidance themes.
- Acts 28:1-6 — viper/snake narrative catalogued under §1 matrix (Apostolic Authority and Miracles) as a Low-risk narrative detail; 28:11-31 (Rome, unhindered proclamation) catalogued under Great Commission Fulfilled, no new gap.
All other chapters (1-15, 17-20, 22-24, 26) contribute directly to the doctrine matrix, missing-vocabulary list, crowded-neighborhood list, or ranked ambiguities above and are cross-referenced throughout this document.
This document extends, and does not contradict, the baseline Romans/Galatians translation_memory.json, bible_term_registry.json, and 12_ai_translation_requirements.md. It should be loaded alongside 08_core_glossary.md before Phase 1 Step 2 (registry construction) proceeds for Acts.