Comparative analysis of criminal prose translation on the example of Kanae Minato’s novel Confessions

Statement of the problem. In this article, the problems of translation of criminal prose are considered through a kind of linguistic experiment on comparative analysis of translations made from the original and stepwise (indirectly) from another translation, awarded with various literary prizes. Although two-step translation may be considered undesirable and forced, it is quite common in the practice of literary translation. The purpose of the article is to analyze the transfer of interlanguage contextual inconsistencies in two translations of Kanae Minato’s Japanese psychological detective novel Confessions [2008]: a published translation from the original Japanese into Russian [Sheregeda, 2023] and his own independent translation from the English version of the novel into Russian [Sazonchik, 2024, in print]. The research methodology consists of the analysis and synthesis of works by Russian and international researchers on the translation of criminal prose. The following methods are used: comparative analysis, the method of mental linguistic experiment and statistical processing of the results obtained. Research results. As a result of the study, the following problems were identified when translating criminal prose from Japanese: 1. Translation of gender-neutral titles when transferring the names of the structural elements of the content (chapters). 2. The inevitable losses in stepwise translation from one language to another, associated with phenomena such as translation transformations and translation of realities. 3. The need to convey the stylistic pragmatics of the original, taking into account the so-called ‘transparent’ stylistics in the genre of criminal prose.