部屋には犯罪の証跡はなかったが、警察は殺人事件ではないかと考えていた。
Although there was no evidence of crime in the room, the police thought that it was a murder case.
It seems the か gets ignored in this translation, unless there is a grammatical pattern I’m not aware of. I would think that the か should add some doubt but it’s not reflected in the translation.
Shouldn’t the translation rather be something like (I’m not sure whether it is proper English, but meaning-wise)?:
Although there was no evidence of crime in the room, the police was considering (thinking about) whether there wasn’t a murder case.
or less literally
Although there was no evidence of crime in the room, the police thought that it might have been a murder case.
And for “Although there was no evidence of crime in the room, the police thought that it was a murder case.” I’d expect this Japanese sentence instead:
ではないか is often used as a “softening” in Japanese, where even though e.g. the speaker thinks something pretty solidly, they present their opinion with an expression implying less certainty for politeness reasons. So sometimes in a natural English translation the softening goes away because we tend to do that a little less in English.
which gets translated as “I think it will rain tomorrow.”
So in the example sentence I don’t think there is as much doubt in the minds of the police as “the police thought that it might have been a murder case” would imply in English. You might go with “the police suspected that it was a murder case”.
Lmao I was just about to mention in another thread about 証跡 being a useless word and when I searched to see if anyone had mentioned it, I realized that I actually pointed out their example sentence used to be wrong. They changed it from “determined” to “thought”