When we started translating Reformed Christian articles from English into Ukrainian, we treated it as a vocabulary problem. The author writes “justification,” we write “виправдання.” Done. After a few hundred articles, we no longer think that way.
The hard part of this work is not finding Ukrainian words. The hard part is that the Ukrainian language has been shaped by a different Christian tradition than the one the source articles come from. The vocabulary exists, but the connotations, defaults, and reference points belong to a different world.
Scripture references are a tradition marker
The first thing a reader notices, before they read a sentence of prose, is whether the scripture references look like ones from their own Bible.
In Reformed English, a reference reads “Romans 8:28” or “Rom. 8:28.” Both are immediately recognizable. In Ukrainian, the standard abbreviations come from the Synodal and Ohienko Bible traditions: “Рим. 8:28.” The form is similar but not identical, and the differences are not optional. A Ukrainian reader who sees “Romans 8:28” or “Р. 8:28” will register the article as foreign, possibly machine-generated, before they have evaluated a single sentence of theological content.
So every reference in every article we touch gets normalized. Book abbreviations match the Ukrainian convention. Verse separators match. Ranges use the right dash. None of this is content work, and none of it shows up in a word-count metric, but skipping it is the difference between an article a Ukrainian reader can settle into and one they keep at arm’s length.
This is also where we have learned not to trust models trained mostly on English-language scripture data. They will produce confident, fluent Ukrainian prose with references nobody in the target audience uses. The fluency hides the foreignness for English-speaking reviewers, which is the worst possible failure mode.
The vocabulary exists, but it carries other weight
The terms we care about, the ones at the heart of Reformed theology, all have established Ukrainian translations. “Justification” maps to “виправдання.” “Sanctification” maps to “освячення.” “Covenant” maps to “завіт.” “Predestination” maps to “передвизначення.” A dictionary returns these answers in a second.
What the dictionary does not say is that “виправдання” in ordinary Ukrainian also means “excuse,” the kind a person offers for being late. The theological meaning is one usage among several, and the everyday meaning is the more common one. A sentence about being justified by faith reads, on first pass, the way “I have an excuse for being late by faith” would read in English. The reader’s brain has to do a small contextual jump to land on the theological reading.
The same is true for “благодать” (grace). It carries theological weight, but it also lives in poetic and pastoral Ukrainian as a more general term for divine favor or beauty. Reformed English uses “grace” in a sharp, technical sense, often contrasted with “works.” Ukrainian writers from an Orthodox background tend to use the word more diffusely, more lyrically. When we translate a Reformed paragraph that hinges on the precision of “grace,” we are not just choosing a word, we are asking the word to do work it usually does not do in its language.
Sometimes the right answer is to add a qualifier. Sometimes it is to restructure the sentence so the theological meaning is forced by context. What is almost never right is the literal one-to-one swap.
Tone is a vocabulary, too
Reformed English writing has a recognizable register. It tends to be argumentative, precise, slightly polemical, and confident in its categories. Ukrainian theological writing, even when it is doctrinally serious, tends to be warmer and more contemplative, partly because so much of the available Ukrainian theological prose comes from a liturgical tradition rather than a sermonic or argumentative one.
If we translate a sharply argumentative Reformed paragraph into smooth, contemplative Ukrainian, we have changed the author’s voice. If we keep the argumentative edge and translate too literally, the Ukrainian comes out sounding combative, sometimes accidentally rude. Neither is what the author meant.
The way we handle this now is to read the source paragraph and ask what tonal mode it is in before translating it. A polemical paragraph stays polemical, but with Ukrainian rhythms. A devotional paragraph stays devotional. A teaching paragraph stays neutral and explanatory. None of this is in the source text explicitly. It is in the spaces between sentences, and the translator has to hear it.
What this changes about how we work
Treating translation as cross-tradition work rather than cross-language work has changed several things about our process.
We keep a glossary, but the glossary is not just terms. It includes notes on which terms carry awkward double meanings, which ones drift in register if used too freely, and which ones need a contextual qualifier on first use in an article.
We chunk articles at paragraph boundaries rather than sentence boundaries, because the tone of a paragraph is what determines the right register for its constituent sentences. Translating a sentence in isolation almost always pulls it toward a default mode that may be wrong for the surrounding context.
We trust scripture-reference formatting less than almost anything else in the output, and we always normalize it as a separate step rather than rely on the model to get it right inline.
We do not chase a one-to-one mapping between source and target vocabulary. We chase a one-to-one mapping between what the source paragraph is doing and what the target paragraph is doing.
The interesting thing about working at this level is that the more we treat translation as tradition work, the less the language itself feels like the hard part. Ukrainian is a deeply expressive language with everything we need, including the precise theological vocabulary. The work is in choosing which expressive choices honor a source written by people who, in many cases, never imagined a Ukrainian reader at the other end.