Analyzing Philip K. Dick's “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” translation into Russian: translation of non-equivalent lexis

This paper is devoted to evaluation of the translation of the well-known novel called “Do androids dream of electric sheep?” written by the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The original text is compared with its Russian translation made in the early 1990’s (assumingly by the group of translators). Due to these factors, as well as a number of other issues, the translation has several characteristic features; the reasons for these features to occur may be of particular interest both for professional translators and amateurs. Evaluation is carried out according to a number of aspects, and the present paper focuses on the first one of them, namely on how well the translator coped with the task of translating the non-equivalent lexis. The author of the paper explains what he means by the non-equivalent lexis in this particular research and analyzes the number of words and word combinations to find out whether their translation is adequate to what the author of the novel tried to express or not. The results obtained in this research can be used later to form the total characteristic of the job done by the translator.