A threat letter in a story “The Ransom of the Red Chief” 
by O’Henry: A comparative analysis of translations 
from English into Russian

The article considers one small-size text characterized by semantic completeness, particularly, a threatening letter from O’Henry’s short story “The Ransom of the Red Chief” intended for the development of the plot. The study aims to identify translation transformations that can provide exact and adequate translation of the letter from English into Russian. Seven translations of the letter performed in 20th–21st centuries were chosen as the material for the study. The material was processed using comparative analysis. As a result, considerable variations in translation of certain words and word combinations were found along with a number of common translator solutions concerning simple sentences and their parts. The latter can either be explained by the nature of syntactic patterns themselves and the requirement to maintain language and speech standards, or, partly, by the impact of previously published translations. Modern translators more readily used grammatical transformations including the change in syntactic pattern, whereas soviet translators more often applied lexical and morphological transformations.