The purpose of this study is to compare the original and the resulting from intertranslation and translation into Chinese figurative basis of East Slavic phraseological units with components — letter names. The object of the analysis is the lettered established phrases used in Ukrainian, Russian or Belarusian fiction texts available in Internet and their East Slavic and Chinese equivalents. The subject of the study is translation strategies for the figurativeness of phraseological units in translations into genetically related and culturally and historically close languages, on the one hand, and genetically and culturally distant languages, on the other. The study uses both general scientific methods and purely linguistic ones within the framework of linguocultural and translation studies: analysis, synthesis, descriptive, comparative and contrastive methods, methods of dictionary definitions, translation analysis and surveys. The field of application of the study lies in the possibility of using its results in further scientific research in linguocultural studies, translation theory and practice, including machine and corpus linguistics, lexicography, and metaphor theory. The result of the comparative analysis of intertranslations of culturally conditioned East Slavic letter phraseology and translations of these units into Chinese are the conclusions that: 1) the possibility of literal translation without loss of imagery of the analyzed group’s expression from one East Slavic language into another in the absence of a direct equivalent; 2) the limited use of the written-graphic code in Chinese translations even of those letter phrases that include the hyperonym BUKVA (LETTER); 3) the need to switch to a different (most often somatic) code in translations of Chinese units named after a particular letter; 4) the expediency of reproducing the graphic representation of a letter in a Chinese text in some cases.
Diadechko et al. (Mon,) studied this question.