The Japanese - saseru causative construction might be seen as ambiguous to non-native Japanese speakers since the same morpheme is used to express both coercion and permission. Rendering the Japanese causative into another language based on its meaning may prove to be challenging, especially since its interpretation can be context-dependent. When translating, some nuances tend to get lost due to the nature of the source and target language(s), and the translator`s own judgement.

I will discuss the Japanese - saseru causative construction from a pragmatical standpoint, focusing on the differences in the perception of the entity of the causer and causee and the overall meaning of a causative sentence through translation ( i.e. how it differs when translated directly from Japanese into English, and how it differs in the Croatian translation of the English version of the same work). The working hypothesis is that the Japanese causative meaning is not completely transferred into Croatian. This is part owing to the translation not being a direct translation from Japanese, but also because the Japanese causative and the entity of the causer/causee might be understood differently in Japanese as opposed to Croatian and English. In such instances, I will propose different possible ways Japanese causation could be expressed more faithfully in both of the target languages. To illustrate this point, examples from the Japanese original, and the English and Croatian translations of Murakami Haruki’s Norwegian wood are used.