Features of the transfer of metaphors and phraseological units while translating fiction from Chinese into Russian

This article aims to analyze the ways to translate metaphors and phraseological units from Chinese into Russian. This challenging issue for an interpreter is still far from developing a universal solution. This pilot study attempts to identify the most appropriate ways to translate the language units. Yan Geling's novella “The thirteen women of Nanjing” and its translation performed by the author of this paper were chosen as the material for the study. During the study, pretranslation analysis and the analysis of translation of metaphorical and phraseological units selected by continuous sampling were performed. The results showed that the most suitable ways of translation were the equivalent techniques and replacement, particularly, replacement of Chinese metaphors and phraseological units with Russian incomplete synonyms suitable in meaning, as well as the replacement of nonmetaphorical Chinese expressions with set expressions in Russian. The most frequently used technique was the replacement of Chinese set expressions with contextual synonyms, the second most frequent technique was equivalent translation, and the least common was the substitution of Chinese nonphraseological units with Russian set expressions.