Executive Summary — Acts — English → Ukrainian

Why it matters

Acts is the church’s own founding narrative — Pentecost, baptism practice, apostolic commissioning, the Jerusalem Council, congregational eldership — translated for a destination-language audience where those exact institutions (sacramental confession and Chrismation, infant baptism and Хрещення Руси, episcopal jurisdiction, a specific 1946 forced-council trauma) are currently live, not historical background, inside a wartime context since 2022 that keeps “church,” “authority,” and “freedom” vocabulary in the daily news. Getting this book wrong in Ukrainian risks either doctrinal flattening or unintended offense to one of three coexisting Christian traditions (OCU, UOC, UGCC) plus a historically persecuted Protestant/Pentecostal minority — all reading the same curriculum.

Key findings

• Full-book coverage confirmed. All 28 chapters reviewed; the core passage (Acts 2:1–41) anchors but never bounds the analysis. No chapter silently omitted — several (14, 18, 21, 22, 23, 25) contribute no new Critical/High terms and are explicitly logged as reviewed.
• 109 enforced terms now sit in assets/translation_memory.json: 51 inherited exactly from the baseline Romans/Galatians package, 58 newly introduced by Acts.
• 62 Critical- or High-risk terms require mandatory human theologian review at every occurrence (14 inherited Critical + 18 inherited High + 11 new Critical + 19 new High).
• 25 doctrines mapped in assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json: 11 Critical, 12 High, 2 Medium, 0 Low — 23 of 25 require theologian review, the remaining 2 (Mutual Care and Economic Sharing; Government and Legal Authority in Acts) require native speaker review. Zero doctrines are automated-only, a materially higher bar than the Romans/Galatians baseline.
• Acts’ single highest-stakes term is хрещення (baptism) — it collides simultaneously with the 988 AD Хрещення Руси national-foundational memory, near-universal infant baptism practice, and this curriculum’s own credobaptist reading of Acts 2:38 and 16:31.
• A second, distinct high-stakes collision is unique to Acts: Собор (the traditional Ukrainian name for the Acts 15 Jerusalem Council) is also the name of the 1946 “Lviv Sobor,” the Soviet-orchestrated forced liquidation of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church — a live historical trauma no other book in this Language Package family has had to navigate.

Risks

• Sacramental collision risk (Critical): покаяння and хрещення are simultaneously the correct plain Ukrainian Bible words AND the technical names of Orthodox/Greek Catholic sacraments. No lexical substitute exists or would help — the risk must be managed by mandatory expository framing, not word choice.
• Jurisdictional collision risk (Critical): церква (highest-frequency Critical term in the book) and старійшини/єпископи both risk being read as commentary on the live OCU/UOC/UGCC legitimacy question if not explicitly framed as universal/local rather than jurisdictional.
• Historical-trauma collision risk (Critical, unique to Acts): Собор [апостолів] for the Jerusalem Council risks unintentionally invoking the 1946 Lviv Sobor if deployed without deliberate awareness.
• Charismatic/cessationist fault line (Critical): дар Святого Духа, наповнені Святим Духом, and Іванове хрещення/Святий Дух (Acts 19:1-7) sit on a live, contested “Spirit baptism” debate between Ukraine’s historic Pentecostal/Charismatic minority and the majority traditions; this curriculum must state its own framing explicitly rather than default silently to any one side.
• Post-Soviet folk-occult collision risk (High): signs-and-wonders and magic/sorcery vocabulary (Simon Magus, Bar-Jesus, the Ephesian magic-books burning) sits directly against active екстрасенси/ворожки folk-occult culture.
• Wartime resonance risk (High, cuts both ways): свідок/мученик (witness/martyr), сміливість (boldness), мир (peace), усе спільне (economic sharing), and не бійся (providence-under-danger) all carry acute, currently-lived wartime resonance that is a genuine pastoral asset if anchored correctly, and a doctrinal dilution risk if allowed to substitute for the text’s specific gospel content.

Opportunities

• Ukraine’s wartime religious revival and its own historic underground-church memory (UGCC 1946–1989, Soviet-era Pentecostal/Baptist persecution) give Acts’ persecution, boldness, and martyrdom narratives unusually strong, ready-made emotional and devotional resonance — an asset no other language in this Language Package family currently has documented at this depth.
• The Ohienko translation tradition already supplies exact, settled renderings for the highest-frequency terms (Ісус, Господь, Святий Дух, Царство Боже, апостол), letting Phase 2 focus review effort on Acts’ genuinely new institutional and sacramental collision points rather than re-litigating baseline vocabulary.
• Acts’ mission narrative (chaplaincy, displaced-persons ministry) maps directly onto Ukraine’s current lived reality, giving “The Great Commission Fulfilled” doctrine immediate, non-abstract pastoral application.

Recommended actions

1. Route every occurrence of the 7 highest-priority mandatory-theologian terms — хрещення, покаяння, дар Святого Духа/наповнені Святим Духом, покладання рук, Собор [апостолів], старійшини/єпископи, виправдовується (Acts 13:39) — through human theologian review before Phase 2 sign-off, with no exceptions.
2. Enforce the cross-document consistency checks flagged in 12_ai_translation_requirements.md: Acts 2:21 must match Romans 10:13; Acts 13:39 must match the baseline’s виправдання; Acts 13:47 must match Acts 26:23.
3. Require explicit expository framing (not lexical substitution) at first occurrence of покаяння, хрещення, and Собор [апостолів] in every Phase 2 output document, per the fencing strategies in analysis/06_linguistic_gap_analysis.md.
4. Prioritize theologian review capacity for chapters 2, 8, 10, 15, 19, and 20 in Step 17 scheduling — these carry the highest concentration of Critical terms in the book.
5. Carry forward, unchanged, every baseline Romans/Galatians forbidden substitution and escalation rule; this Acts package extends but never loosens that foundation.

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Consistent with assets/translation_memory.json (v1), assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json (v1), analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md, and analysis/12_ai_translation_requirements.md. Doctrine and term counts above are reconciled against analysis/11_doctrine_analysis.md’s Part 1 tally (Critical=11, High=12, Medium=2, Low=0), which corrects a minor undercount in the initially generated assets/doctrine_risk_registry.json risk_summary field.