Linguistic Gap Analysis
06 Linguistic Gap Analysis — Jude (English → Vietnamese)
Scope and Method
Jude is a single 25-verse chapter. Per the PRD full-book-coverage mandate, this analysis treats the entire letter, verses 1–25, as in scope, with the core passage (1:3–23, the body of the argument) as the theological anchor rather than the analytic boundary. The opening greeting (1:1–2) and closing doxology (1:24–25) are explicitly included below; neither is silently omitted.
This document extends the baseline Romans Language Package. Every term already fixed in translation_memory.json (salvation, faith, grace, saints, called, Lord, God, Jesus/Christ, Holy Spirit, apostle, peace, Moses, Amen, etc.) is reused exactly, per hard rule. This analysis identifies (1) the doctrine vocabulary matrix for Jude’s six curriculum doctrines, (2) missing-vocabulary and crowded-semantic-neighborhood risks requiring “fencing” (explicit negative definition against a near-neighbor concept), (3) transliteration-vs-paraphrase decisions, and (4) a ranked list of Jude’s highest-risk ambiguities for Phase 2 translators and reviewers.
1. Doctrine Vocabulary Matrix
For each of the six curriculum doctrines: the available Vietnamese term(s), the specific weakness/gap in the existing vocabulary, and the recommended strategy carried forward into translation memory and Phase 2 instructions.
1.1 Contending for the Faith Once Delivered (Jude 1:3, 1:20)
| Available VN Term(s) | Weakness / Gap | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| đức tin (đã có sẵn, established) | Standard “personal trust” sense only; does not by itself signal the closed, apostolic, propositional “deposit of doctrine” sense required in 1:3, 1:20 | Reuse đức tin but require an obligatory qualifying clause/translator note in both occurrences distinguishing “the faith” (deposit) from generic “faith” (trust); never substitute đạo |
| đạo (generic “Way/religion/teaching”) | Crowded neighbor: names Buddhism (đạo Phật), Confucianism (đạo Nho), Caodaism (đạo Cao Đài), and any “path” indiscriminately; using it here would present the gospel as one path among equally valid others | Forbid as a rendering of “the faith” in this technical sense; retain only as a possible descriptive gloss in teaching notes, never in the translated text itself |
| tranh chiến (proposed, new) | “Đấu tranh” (the natural cognate choice) carries heavy Marxist/class-struggle political connotation from 20th-century Vietnamese political rhetoric | Use tranh chiến (vì đức tin), explicitly avoiding đấu tranh; anchor with surrounding context (defending revealed truth, not political mobilization) |
| một lần đủ cả (proposed, for ἅπαξ) | No single Vietnamese word cleanly carries “once-for-all, non-repeatable, completed” without added phrasing | Use full phrase đã được truyền cho…một lần đủ cả; this closes the door on any reading of Scripture as one installment within an open, continuing-revelation tradition (relevant against mediums/spirit-writing practices familiar in Vietnamese folk religion) |
Gap severity: High. No existing single Vietnamese theological term unambiguously marks “a fixed, closed body of revealed doctrine” without either (a) defaulting to đạo’s religious pluralism or (b) sounding like a private personal conviction. This is a genuine missing-vocabulary problem, not merely a crowded-neighborhood one, and is resolved by compound phrasing plus mandatory translator notes rather than a single-word coinage.
1.2 Judgment on Ungodly False Teachers (Jude 1:4–19)
| Available VN Term(s) | Weakness / Gap | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| không tin kính (ἀσεβής/ἀσέβεια) | Risk of being read as mere social impoliteness or bad luck rather than a moral-relational category (lack of reverence toward a personal God) | Reuse consistently across all occurrences, including the fourfold repetition in 1:15; do not vary vocabulary for rhetorical smoothing — repetition is the point |
| sự kết án / sự phán xét (κρίμα/κρίσις) | Vietnamese folk vocabulary readily supplies an impersonal alternative frame: nghiệp (karma) or số (fate) as the “cause” of misfortune | Retain forensic, judicial framing explicitly; both terms must read as a personal Judge’s sentence, never a self-generated karmic consequence |
| ma quỷ (διάβολος) | Crowded neighbor: bare “ma” names the vast folk category of wandering/hungry ghosts propitiated in ancestor veneration and popular ritual (cúng cô hồn, đốt vàng mã) | Never render bare ma; ma quỷ (or Sa-tan in cross-reference) must be fenced as the one personal, fallen, cosmic adversary — not an appeasable ancestral or wandering spirit |
| tư dục (ἐπιθυμία) | Crowded neighbor: dục is the standard Buddhist term for craving/desire, the impersonal metaphysical root of suffering (dukkha) within samsara | Retain tư dục (not bare dục); fence explicitly as personal moral rebellion against a personal God’s revealed will, not an impersonal metaphysical force to be extinguished through practice |
| quyền thống trị / các đấng vinh hiển (κυριότης/δόξαι) | No existing Vietnamese Bible precedent distinguishes these two abstract/concrete referents from ordinary “sự vinh hiển” (God’s glory) and “Chúa” (Lord); risk of collapsing three distinct terms into one gloss | Use distinct renderings per term consistently; add translator note at 1:8 flagging the three-way distinction (Lordship title / abstract governing authority / concrete majestic beings) |
| Khốn cho (οὐαί) | Vietnamese has no equally weighty single-word cognate; risk of softening into an expression of pity (“thật đáng thương”) | Retain the OT covenant-lawsuit register of Khốn cho; teaching note should connect to the prophetic woe-oracles (Isaiah, Amos) already familiar from OT curriculum units, not everyday commiseration |
Gap severity: High to Critical (see §1.4/ranked list for the three named OT types and δεσπότης καὶ κύριος).
1.3 Old Testament Warnings as Types (Israel, Angels, Sodom) (Jude 1:5–7, 1:11)
| Available VN Term(s) | Weakness / Gap | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| hủy diệt / hư mất (ἀπόλλυμι) | Crowded neighbor: some Vietnamese Buddhist-influenced readers may hear “destruction” as dissolution into non-being or as one turn of an impersonal cause-and-effect wheel | Fence explicitly: judicial, personal destruction enacted by a personal God as punishment for unbelief, tied to a specific historical event (the Exodus generation), not annihilation into an impersonal void |
| thiên sứ (ἄγγελος) | Crowded neighbor: broad Vietnamese folk category of thần linh (local tutelary spirits, ancestor spirits) risks bleeding into “angel” if context is thin | Retain thiên sứ; every occurrence should carry enough surrounding context (created, accountable, subject to God’s judgment) to distinguish from folk spirits who receive offerings and mediate blessing |
| lửa đời đời (πυρὸς αἰωνίου) | Missing-vocabulary risk in the other direction: Vietnamese Buddhist cosmology has notions of hell-realms (địa ngục) that are explicitly temporary, purgative stages preceding rebirth | Fence explicitly against any purgative/temporary reading; Sodom’s judgment is historical, final, and paradigmatic of an unending, non-cyclical fate |
| đường của Ca-in / sự sai lạc của Ba-la-am / sự phản loạn của Cô-rê | Not a vocabulary gap but a background-knowledge gap: these three named OT types presuppose Genesis 4, Numbers 22–24, and Numbers 16 narrative literacy that first-generation Vietnamese believers from Buddhist/Confucian/folk backgrounds are unlikely to have | Retain transliterated proper names exactly as listed; supplement (not substitute) with brief in-text or footnoted narrative glosses so the typological argument does not go unrecognized |
Gap severity: Medium-High; the core Vietnamese renderings are adequate, but the doctrine’s persuasive force depends on OT narrative literacy that must be supplied outside the glossary itself (a curriculum-design need, not a translation-term need).
1.4 Mercy and Rescue of the Wavering (Jude 1:2, 1:21–23)
| Available VN Term(s) | Weakness / Gap | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| sự thương xót (ἔλεος) | Crowded neighbor: từ bi is the standard Vietnamese Buddhist term for compassion, but it names a virtue cultivated through meditative insight and detachment, not the initiating action of a personal rescuing God | Retain sự thương xót; never substitute từ bi; every occurrence should be anchored to God’s/Christ’s active rescue, not a cultivated inner disposition |
| những người đang nghi ngờ / lưỡng lự (διακρινόμενοι) | No existing Vietnamese Bible precedent for this specific pastoral category (genuine internal doubt within the believing community, distinct from the false teachers and from settled apostates) | Reuse phrase from Table 5 of the core glossary; add translator note distinguishing this group sharply from the ἀσεβεῖς (ungodly false teachers) earlier in the letter — mercy is due to the wavering, judgment to the false teachers, and the two must not be pastorally conflated |
| cứu…kéo (họ) ra khỏi lửa (σῴζετε…ἁρπάζοντες ἐκ πυρός) | No single Vietnamese idiom captures both urgency and violence-of-rescue in one word | Retain the fuller descriptive phrase; the imagery must echo 1:7’s lửa đời đời so the reader recognizes the same eschatological fire, not an unrelated metaphor for present-life hardship |
| áo xống bị ô uế bởi xác thịt (ἐσπιλωμένον χιτῶνα) | Risk of being misread through a ritual-purity/taboo lens familiar from folk practice (avoiding contact with unclean objects/persons) rather than a moral-hatred-of-sin-while-loving-the-sinner lens | Add translator note distinguishing hatred of the sin’s residue from any implied social avoidance of the person; the passage commands rescue, not quarantine |
Gap severity: Medium-High; primary risk is the từ bi neighbor, which is a live pastoral risk given how frequently từ bi appears in everyday Vietnamese moral vocabulary (including among nominal Christians raised in mixed-religious households).
1.5 Kept by God and Presented Blameless (Jude 1:1, 1:6, 1:13, 1:21, 1:24)
| Available VN Term(s) | Weakness / Gap | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| giữ (τηρέω, single root across ≥5 distinct senses) | The single Vietnamese verb giữ must silently carry angelic failure (“did not keep,” 1:6), judicial custody (1:6, 1:13), Christ’s prior keeping (1:1), believers’ active responsibility (1:21), and God’s climactic final keeping (1:24) — a real one-word-to-five-senses compression risk | Retain giữ throughout for lexical/thematic consistency (do not diversify vocabulary across occurrences), but require a translator note at each occurrence identifying subject, object, and sense, so Phase 2 reviewers can verify the through-line is not lost in translation or in reader comprehension |
| trình (anh em) ra không chỗ trách được, đứng trước sự vinh hiển Ngài (ἄμωμος…κατενώπιον τῆς δόξης) | No single Vietnamese word carries the OT sacrificial-purity connotation of ἄμωμος (an unblemished offering) together with the presentational/forensic sense | Retain the fuller descriptive phrase; add translator note connecting to OT unblemished-sacrifice background (Leviticus) so the image is not flattened to generic “sinlessness” |
| sự sống đời đời (ζωὴ αἰώνιος) | Crowded neighbor: risk of being heard alongside luân hồi/đầu thai as merely “life that continues,” rather than a single unending personal life that terminates the cycle rather than repeating it | Reuse baseline caution verbatim; every occurrence should make explicit that this is a single, unending, personal life with God — the opposite of, not one stop within, a cycle of rebirths |
Gap severity: Medium; vocabulary itself is adequate (largely reused from baseline patterns), but the tracking of a single polysemous verb (giữ) across the whole letter is a translation-management risk rather than a lexical-gap risk.
1.6 Doxology and God’s Preserving Power (Jude 1:24–25)
| Available VN Term(s) | Weakness / Gap | Recommended Strategy |
|---|---|---|
| Đức Chúa Trời có một, là Đấng duy nhất (μόνῳ θεῷ) | Vietnam’s religious marketplace (Buddhism, Confucianism, Caodaism, folk religion, ancestor veneration, and a plurality of deities/spirits) makes flat monotheistic exclusivity a genuinely foreign claim requiring emphasis, not a routine translation choice | Retain full emphatic phrase (not a bare “Đức Chúa Trời”); do not compress for economy — the redundancy (có một + duy nhất) is doctrinally load-bearing |
| Cứu Chúa của chúng ta (σωτῆρι ἡμῶν) | Vietnamese religious plurality readily supplies competing “savior” figures (bodhisattvas such as Quán Thế Âm invoked for rescue from distress, deified heroes invoked for protection) | Retain Cứu Chúa exactly, and require the terminological echo back to sự cứu rỗi (1:3) be visible/traceable across the letter so learners see the soteriological through-line, not an isolated title |
| sự uy nghi / quyền năng lớn / quyền (μεγαλωσύνη/κράτος/ἐξουσία) | Three closely related abstract-attribute nouns risk being collapsed into near-synonyms in natural Vietnamese, losing the doxology’s rhetorical fullness (deliberate accumulation of distinct majesty-terms) | Retain three distinct renderings; do not merge into two terms for stylistic smoothing |
| trước muôn đời, hiện nay, và cho đến đời đời không cùng (πρὸ παντὸς τοῦ αἰῶνος…) | Crowded neighbor: Vietnamese Buddhist cosmology’s kalpas (a term sometimes loosely rendered “muôn đời” in colloquial speech) describes recurring cosmic ages, not a single linear timeline | Retain full phrase with both “trước” (before) and “cho đến…không cùng” (unto without end) bracketing markers explicit, closing off any cyclical reading |
Gap severity: High, concentrated in the doxology’s exclusivity and eternity claims — these are the passages most exposed to Vietnam’s religiously plural marketplace of savior-figures and cyclical time.
2. Missing Vocabulary vs. Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods
2.1 Genuine Missing Vocabulary (no adequate existing single term; requires compound phrasing/coinage)
| Concept | Gap | Resolution |
|---|---|---|
| ”The faith” as closed apostolic deposit (πίστις, technical sense) | No single word distinguishes deposit-of-doctrine from personal trust or from generic đạo | đức tin + mandatory translator note; never đạo |
| ἅπαξ (“once for all,” non-repeatable) | No single adverb/adjective conveys closed finality of a revelation-event | đã được truyền cho…một lần đủ cả (full phrase) |
| δεσπότης καὶ κύριος as single Christological title-pair | No pre-existing fixed Vietnamese Bible convention for this exact double-title construction applied to Christ | Đấng Chủ Tể và Chúa (duy nhất) — coined for this project; flagged Critical, every occurrence requires theologian review to confirm co-reference to Christ is preserved |
| ψυχικοί (“soul-ish”/natural, unregenerate anthropological category) | No everyday Vietnamese word for this Pauline anthropological category | Reuse có tánh xác thịt from the established 1 Corinthians 2:14 Vietnamese Bible convention (cross-book consistency, not a Jude-specific coinage) |
| δίς ἀποθανόντα (“twice dead”) | No compact Vietnamese idiom for double/intensified spiritual-then-eschatological death | hai lần chết (literal calque) + translator note anticipating final “second death” |
2.2 Crowded Semantic Neighborhoods (adequate term exists but sits close to a rival concept and needs active fencing)
| Vietnamese Term | Doctrinal Use | Rival Neighbor | Cultural Source of Rival | Fencing Required |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ma quỷ | The devil (διάβολος) | ma (wandering/hungry ghosts) | Ancestor veneration, folk ritual (cúng cô hồn) | Must read as one personal cosmic adversary, never an appeasable spirit class |
| tư dục | Sinful desires (ἐπιθυμία) | dục | Buddhist doctrine of craving as root of suffering | Must read as personal rebellion against a personal God’s will, not impersonal metaphysical cause |
| sự thương xót | Mercy (ἔλεος) | từ bi | Buddhist cultivated compassion | Must read as God’s initiating rescue-action, not a cultivated inner virtue |
| sự cứu rỗi / Cứu Chúa | Salvation / Savior | sự giải thoát; bodhisattva-rescue figures (e.g., Quán Thế Âm) | Buddhist liberation from rebirth; devotional rescue-deities | Must read as reconciliation with a personal God through Christ’s specific finished work, exclusive of rival rescuers |
| sự sống đời đời | Eternal life (ζωὴ αἰώνιος) | luân hồi/đầu thai | Buddhist rebirth cycle | Must read as a single unending personal life, the termination of any cycle, not a stage within one |
| lửa đời đời | Eternal fire (πυρὸς αἰωνίου) | temporary purgative hell-realms (địa ngục tạm) | Buddhist cosmology | Must read as final, unending, non-purgative judgment |
| đạo | (rejected rendering for “the faith”) | Buddhism/Confucianism/Caodaism as “a Way” | Vietnamese generic religious vocabulary | Forbidden as translation of technical πίστις; permitted only in descriptive metalanguage, never in-text |
| thiên sứ | Angels (ἄγγελος) | thần linh (local/ancestor spirits) | Folk religion, ancestor veneration | Must read as created, accountable beings under God’s direct judgment, not offering-receiving local deities |
| các thánh đồ | Saints (ἅγιοι) | các thánh (deified folk heroes, e.g., Thánh Trần) | Folk temple veneration (đền) | Must never be shortened to bare các thánh; reused exactly from baseline |
| Đức Thánh Linh | Holy Spirit | thần linh | Folk spirit category | Must appear in full at every occurrence, including negated form in 1:19 (không có Đức Thánh Linh) |
| tranh chiến (vì đức tin) | Contend for the faith | đấu tranh | Marxist-era political-struggle rhetoric | Must read as contention for revealed truth, not political/class mobilization |
| sự kết án / sự phán xét | Condemnation/judgment | nghiệp (karma), số (fate) | Buddhist/folk cosmology | Must read as a personal Judge’s forensic sentence, not impersonal cause-and-effect |
| giữ | Kept (τηρέω, backbone verb) | (no rival concept, but risk of semantic flattening across 5 distinct senses) | — | Requires translator notes per occurrence, not a rival-concept fence, but the same discipline of explicit disambiguation |
Observation: Jude’s semantic-neighborhood risk profile is denser than Romans’ per verse, because the letter’s central polemic (false teaching, judgment, sensuality, and rescue) repeatedly lands on exactly the vocabulary zones where Buddhist soteriology (craving, rebirth, liberation, compassion) and Vietnamese folk/ancestor practice (ghosts, spirits, deified heroes) supply the nearest natural-sounding Vietnamese words. Nearly every High/Critical term in this letter has a “too-easy,” fluent-sounding wrong answer available in ordinary Vietnamese religious vocabulary — this is the letter’s dominant translation-risk pattern.
3. Transliteration vs. Paraphrase Decisions
| Item | Decision | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
| Jude (author) | Transliterate: Giu-đe | Established Bản Dịch Truyền Thống convention specifically distinguishes Giu-đe (this author) from Giu-đa (Judas Iscariot); must never collapse the two |
| James, Cain, Balaam, Korah, Enoch, Adam, Michael, Moses | Transliterate, using existing Bible-translation forms | Proper names; no translation option exists or is desirable |
| Sodom and Gomorrah | Transliterate: Sô-đôm và Gô-mô-rơ | Established proper-name form; paraphrase would erase the specific historical referent needed for the typology |
| Amen | Transliterate: A-men | Already established liturgical transliteration in baseline |
| δεσπότης (Master) | Paraphrase: Đấng Chủ Tể (not transliterated) | No natural Vietnamese transliteration exists for this Greek term; a descriptive title is required, and must be worded to clearly co-refer with Chúa to the same Person (Christ) |
| ἐπαγωνίζεσθαι (contend) | Paraphrase: tranh chiến (vì đức tin) | A verb concept, not a proper noun; transliteration is not applicable, but paraphrase choice must avoid the đấu tranh political register |
| ἅπαξ παραδοθείσῃ | Paraphrase (full clause) | No single-word or transliterated solution; the finality claim requires explicit clausal treatment |
| πίστις (deposit sense) | Paraphrase using existing đức tin + note (no new coinage) | Coining a brand-new Vietnamese word risks reader unfamiliarity outweighing any disambiguation benefit; the existing term plus a consistent translator note is preferred per the “prefer established terms over new coinages” rule in the baseline AI instructions |
| ψυχικοί | Paraphrase, reusing cross-book convention (có tánh xác thịt) | Preserves consistency with existing 1 Corinthians 2:14 rendering rather than inventing a Jude-specific term |
| ζόφος / σκότος (darkness terms) | Paraphrase (sự tối tăm mù mịt / sự tối tăm đời đời) | Common Vietnamese vocabulary suffices; no transliteration warranted |
| ἀγάπαι (love feasts) | Paraphrase: tiệc yêu thương | Descriptive rendering already intelligible to a Vietnamese Protestant church context familiar with fellowship meals; transliteration would be opaque |
| δόξαι (“glorious ones,” concrete beings) | Paraphrase: các đấng vinh hiển, kept distinct from abstract sự vinh hiển | Avoids opacity of transliteration while preventing collapse into the unrelated abstract-glory term |
General rule applied: Transliterate only proper names and already-established liturgical markers (A-men). All doctrinal/theological concepts are rendered by paraphrase using existing Vietnamese Protestant Bible vocabulary wherever possible, per the baseline’s instruction to avoid inventing new Hán-Việt coinages unfamiliar to ordinary readers. The one clear exception requiring new phrasing (not a new single word) is Đấng Chủ Tể và Chúa (duy nhất) for δεσπότης καὶ κύριος, flagged Critical for that reason.
4. Ranked List of Jude’s Highest-Risk Ambiguities
Ranked by combined severity of (a) doctrinal centrality, (b) syncretism/collapse risk into a fluent-sounding wrong answer, and (c) frequency/structural importance across the letter.
-
δεσπότης καὶ κύριος, “our only Master and Lord” (1:4) — Critical. Grammatical ambiguity (could be misread as splitting Master/Father from Lord/Son) intersects directly with the letter’s high Christology. A translator defaulting to a natural-sounding split reading would quietly demote Christ’s deity. Requires theologian review at every occurrence and a fixed appositional rendering.
-
πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες, “devoid of the Spirit” (1:19) — Critical. The single highest risk of unintentional softening: a fluent but doctrinally fatal mistranslation would render this as a vague lack of “spirituality,” which a devout Buddhist or Confucian reader could satisfy. Must retain full Đức Thánh Linh in negated form.
-
ἔλεος vs. ἀγάπη θεοῦ vs. từ bi collapse in the mercy passages (1:2, 21–23) — High-Critical. The entire “Mercy and Rescue” doctrine is exposed to quiet substitution of a cultivated-compassion frame (từ bi) for an initiating-rescue frame (sự thương xót), which would invert the doctrine’s agency (self-cultivated virtue vs. God’s action).
-
πίστις technical sense vs. đạο (1:3, 1:20) — High. The single most likely “invisible” mistranslation: đạο is fluent, natural, and doctrinally corrosive, reducing a closed apostolic deposit to one path among Vietnam’s many. No orthographic or grammatical flag would catch this at machine-QA level; requires an explicit forbidden-substitution rule (parallel to the baseline’s giải thoát/luân hồi rules).
-
ζωὴ αἰώνιος / πυρὸς αἰωνίου vs. luân hồi / temporary hell-realms (1:7, 1:21) — High. Two ends of the same eschatological-timeline risk: the letter’s linear, non-cyclical framework of final destiny is the doctrine most exposed to Vietnam’s dominant Buddhist cosmological default.
-
τηρέω (“kept,” 1:1, 6, 13, 21, 24) — High. Not a syncretism risk but a structural-coherence risk: five distinct senses carried by one Vietnamese verb (giữ) across the letter. A translator handling verses independently (as in segment-by-segment Phase 2 batch processing) could easily lose the deliberate theological through-line without cross-segment tracking.
-
σπιλάδες / σπίλοι, “hidden reefs”/“blemishes” (1:12) — High. Textual-tradition-dependent term where the two candidate Greek readings produce genuinely different (though related) images; the choice must be made once, recorded, and applied consistently, or the same letter could inconsistently mix danger-imagery and stain-imagery translations across documents.
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ἀσεβής/ἀσέβεια, fourfold repetition (1:15) — High. Risk is stylistic smoothing: a natural translator instinct to vary vocabulary across a fourfold repetition (for elegance) would erase Jude’s rhetorical intensification, which is itself part of the doctrinal weight of the judgment pronouncement.
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διάβολος vs. ma (1:9) — High. High-frequency folk practice (ancestor veneration, wandering-ghost appeasement) supplies an extremely natural-sounding wrong translation (ma) that a non-specialist native speaker reviewer might not flag as doctrinally different from ma quỷ, since both share the root morpheme.
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μόνῳ θεῷ / σωτῆρι ἡμῶν, doxological exclusivity (1:25) — High. In a religiously plural marketplace with multiple invoked rescuer-figures, the doxology’s redundant exclusivity language (có một, là Đấng duy nhất) is doctrinally load-bearing precisely because it is redundant; an efficiency-minded paraphrase that trims the redundancy would weaken the letter’s closing claim.
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κυριότης / δόξαι, three-way term collapse (1:8) — High. Risk that a translator, seeing three glory/lordship-adjacent terms in close proximity (Chúa, sự vinh hiển, and these two new terms), collapses them into fewer distinct Vietnamese words for readability, losing Jude’s specific three-part accusation structure.
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ἐπιθυμία vs. dục (1:16, 1:18) — Medium-High. Lower-frequency risk than #3/#5 because tư dục (compound form) already partially fences the term, but reviewers should still watch for drift toward bare dục in less formal Phase 2 outputs (e.g., discussion-question materials).
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ψυχικοί, anthropological register (1:19) — Medium. Risk is primarily external consistency (must match the 1 Corinthians 2:14 Vietnamese rendering already in use across the curriculum ecosystem) rather than an internal ambiguity within Jude itself.
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The three OT type-names (Cain, Balaam, Korah, 1:11) — Medium. Risk is background-knowledge absence, not lexical ambiguity; flagged here because without supplementary narrative teaching the typological argument (the doctrinal payload of the term) will not land, even though the Vietnamese proper names themselves carry no syncretism risk.
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ἀγαλλίασις / doxological joy tone (1:24) — Low-Medium. Lowest-risk item on this list; included only because it closes a letter otherwise dominated by warning, and a translator carrying the letter’s judgment-heavy register forward by inertia could under-render the final note of exultant joy.
Summary Recommendation for Phase 2
Extend translation_memory.json and bible_term_registry.json with all entries already staged in the Jude core glossary and Jude term registry (prior outputs), applying:
- Forbidden substitution additions for this curriculum: đạο (for “the faith”), từ bi (for “mercy”), bare dục (for “sinful desires”), bare ma (for “the devil”), đấu tranh (for “contend”), temporary/purgative hell-realm framings (for “eternal fire”), and any splitting of δεσπότης from κύριος in 1:4.
- Mandatory translator notes at every occurrence of: πίστις (deposit sense), τηρέω (all five senses), σωτῆρι ἡμῶν / μόνῳ θεῷ, and πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες.
- Locked textual-tradition choice for σπιλάδες/σπίλοι (1:12), recorded once and applied consistently across all Phase 2 outputs.