This article describes the translation into Chinese of phraseological units in «The book of words», which are the treasury of moral, philosophical, socio-political and intellectual-satirical thoughts of the greatest figure of Kazakh enlighteners, a brilliant poet and thinker, AbayKunanbaev. There are many mistakes when translating phraseological units in Abay's words of wisdom into foreign languages. There are several types. Firstly, when the translator perceives phraseological units as a lexical unit in the literal sense, and not as stable phrases, and translates them literally. Secondly, he is faced with the problem of selecting an equivalent in the target language. Thirdly, linguistic units used in a figurative sense are perceived as phraseological and are translated as so. In such cases, it we cannot say that the translation correctly conveys the content, meaning and artistic features of the original. The basic requirement is that the translator should strive to translate the phraseological units of the original text using the phraseological units of the target language.