An Anonymous Letter of Warning in Fiction: a Comparative analysis of Translations from English into Russian

The article deals with a letter, that doesn’t bear the name of the sender, and which is given in a work of fiction for the sake of plot development and creating suspence in particular. This kind of inserted texts so far has not been covered by either linguistic or literary scholars, which specifies the novelty in this research. The peculiarities of an anonymous letter, that bears a warning – the most frequent kind in both Russian and English literature – have been made clear. We have studied eight translations of a small-size text from the novel «Adventures of Huckleberry Finn» by Mark Twain into the Russian language, made from the late XIXth up to the early XXIst century. Such fiction text fragments are comprehensible by themselves and, therefore, ideal for comparative analysis of translations. We have determined considerable variations in translation of separate words and combinations, and relative congruity of simple sentences. The latter can either be explained by the same syntactical structure and observance of language and speech norms, or by the awareness of the previous works. Our results can be used by those, who study the rules of translaing fiction, detective and adventure fiction in particular.