Введение в теорию и практику перевода (на материале английского языка) - стр. 13

These are the main ways of translating figurative phraseological units.

When translating phraseological units it is necessary to remember that some of them have a definite national character, which makes their translation rather difficult. On the one hand, it is not always easy to preserve the national "flavour" in translation, on the other – there is always a danger of introducing national elements of TL. Semantically "to carry coals to Newcastle" and "ездить в Тулу со своим самоваром" are analogues, nevertheless one can hardly insert Тула in a text translated from English. In such cases it is advisable to find (or coin, if necessary) a neutral expression with the same figurative meaning: "носить уголь в шахту (воду в реку, дрова в лес и т.д.)". There should be no "коломенская верста" or "Тришкин кафтан" or "щи лаптем хлебать" in a Russian translation of any foreign text.

They say that translation starts where dictionaries end. Though somewhat exaggerated, this saying truly reflects the nature of translation. Dictionaries list all regular correspondences between elements of lexical systems of languages. Translation deals not so much with the system of language but with speech (or to be more exact – with a text, which is a product of speech). So in the process of translating one has to find it by himself which of the meanings of a polysemantic word is realized in a particular context, to see if under the influence of this context the word has acquired a slightly new shade of meaning and to decide how this new shade of meaning (not listed in any dictionary) can be rendered in TL. E.g. no dictionary ever translates the verb "to be" as "лежать"; nevertheless it is the best way to translate it in the sentence "She was in hospital" – "Она лежала в больнице". Moreover, it has already been said that every language has its specific way of expressing things, a way that may be quite alien to other languages. That is why a literal (word-for-word) translation of a foreign text may turn out clumsy (if not ridiculous) in TL. To avoid it one has to resort to some special devices worked out by the theory of translation and known as lexical transformations (or contextual substitutions) (лексические трансформации, или контекстуальные замены). There are several types of such transformations.

1. The first type of lexical transformations is used in translating words with wide and non-differentiated meaning. The essence of this transformation lies in translating such words of SL by words with specified concrete meaning in TL (трансформация дифференциации и конкретизации). When translating from English into Russian they use it especially often in the sphere of verbs. If English verbs mostly denote actions in rather a vague general way, Russian verbs are very concrete in denoting not only the action itself but also the manner of performing this action as well: "to go (on foot, by train, by plane, etc.)" – "