Executive Summary — Acts (English → Thai)

Why it matters

Acts is the pipeline’s first narrative (non-epistolary) curriculum for Thai, and it introduces the single highest-stakes Thai-specific collision risk yet documented in this Language Package family: “filled with the Holy Spirit” sits directly beside a fluent, everyday Thai vocabulary for spirit possession (ผีเข้า, การทรงเจ้า, วิญญาณสิงร่าง). Get this wrong at Acts 2:4 and the error propagates through every Spirit-filling passage in the book (4:8, 31; 6:3, 5; 7:55; 9:17; 13:9, 52) and undermines the doctrine anchoring the whole curriculum. Acts also narrates, as history, the exact justification-by-faith controversy Galatians argues theologically (Acts 15//Galatians 2), so this package must stay perfectly synchronized with the existing baseline — not reinvent it.

Key findings

• 20 doctrines catalogued across all 28 chapters (10 Critical, 8 High, 2 Medium, 0 Low) — no chapter silently omitted; 10 chapters carry no new Critical/High doctrine and are explicitly marked “Reviewed.”
• 106 enforced terms in the Acts translation memory: 47 inherited exactly from the Romans/Galatians baseline, 59 newly introduced by Acts.
• Term-level risk: 24 Critical-risk terms and 33 High-risk terms (57 combined) require mandatory or escalated human-theologian review under the baseline’s priority-order rules — nearly double the Critical+High term count Galatians added to Romans.
• 18 of the 20 doctrines route to mandatory human theologian review; only 2 (The Church as Community; Church Governance and Leadership) route to native-speaker review; zero doctrines are automated-only.
• The core passage (Acts 2:1-41) alone contains 5 of the highest-ranked ambiguities in the entire book, including the Joel 2:32 citation (2:21) that must match the Romans 10:13 rendering verbatim, and “God made him both Lord and Christ” (2:36), which risks a merit/apotheosis misreading distinct from anything in Romans or Galatians.

Risks

1. Spirit-possession collision (Critical). เต็มด้วยพระวิญญาณบริสุทธิ์ vs. ผีเข้า/ทรงเจ้า — the book’s single largest exposure, recurring 8+ times.
2. Karma-ledger collision on forgiveness (Critical). การทรงยกบาปโทษ vs. ล้างกรรม/ลบล้างบาปกรรม — tempting because the karma frame is ubiquitous in ordinary Thai religious speech, not just formal Buddhism.
3. “The Way” vs. มรรค (High, frequency-driven). A single lapse into the Buddhist Noble-Path term anywhere across 9:2, 19:9/23, 22:4, 24:14/22 would recur silently through back-translation.
4. Occult-vocabulary density (High, cumulative). Signs/wonders, name-of-Jesus healing, and laying-on-of-hands sit beside Thailand’s dense amulet/incantation/spirit-medium marketplace in nearly every miracle narrative (chs. 3-5, 8, 13, 19).
5. Exclusivity softening under religious pluralism (Critical). “No other name” (4:12) and the Jerusalem Council’s grace-not-law ruling (15:11) are the book’s most countercultural claims against Thailand’s default “many valid paths” posture.
6. Cross-document drift. Acts 2:21/Romans 10:13 (Joel citation) and Acts 16:30-31/Romans 10:9-10 (salvation confession) must render identically; any stylistic drift breaks the pipeline’s verbatim-consistency rule.

Opportunities

• Acts’ own text does the polemical work for the translator at several points (Simon Magus, Elymas, the Ephesian magic-book burning): the book directly and negatively names the exact folk-practice vocabulary (เวทมนตร์คาถา, ไสยศาสตร์) that would otherwise be tempting elsewhere — a built-in teaching asset, not just a risk to manage.
• The Cornelius narrative (Acts 10-11) and the Jerusalem Council (Acts 15) give the curriculum a strong narrative (not just propositional) vehicle for teaching grace-versus-merit and Jew/Gentile unity, reinforcing rather than duplicating the Galatians package.
• Established Thai Christian loanwords (บัพติศมา, คริสเตียน) are already fluent and safe by virtue of their foreignness — no new coinage risk there, freeing translator attention for the harder collision points.

Recommended actions

1. Mandate the translator-note requirement at every filled_with_holy_spirit, tongues_other_languages, repentance, baptism, forgiveness_of_sins, and the_way occurrence before Phase 2 output is accepted — these six terms account for the bulk of Critical/High exposure by frequency.
2. Hard-gate Acts 2:1-41 (the entire core passage) for mandatory theologian review as a single unit, given its unmatched density of Critical-risk terms in one passage.
3. Cross-load the Galatians-derived Critical entries (works_of_the_law, freedom) before translating Acts 13 and 15 narrative dialogue, to prevent quiet drift toward กรรมดี/บุญ vocabulary in what is technically narrative rather than epistolary text.
4. Enforce the resurrection/revival term split (การเป็นขึ้นจากตาย vs. ฟื้นขึ้นมามีชีวิต) as a hard validation rule, given Acts is the first curriculum to narrate a non-Christ revival (Eutychus, 20:9-10) alongside Christ’s unique resurrection.
5. Route all Roman-citizenship and governing-authority passages (16:37-38; 22:25-28; 25:10-11) through the same lèse-majesté-sensitivity review the baseline already established for Romans 13.
6. Verify verbatim cross-curriculum consistency for the Joel 2:32 citation and the salvation-confession formula as a standing Phase 2 Step 17 checklist item, not a one-time check.