The paper is a comparative analysis of phraseological Russian units with their English, French and German equivalents. The first part examines today’s traditional dictionaries. After the confrontation of Russian unilingual dictionaries, the analysis of bilingual dictionaries is proposed. Then, an overview of new technological sources is made. A particular intention is given to corpora, that allow showing idiom in context. An opinion about the necessity of the use of corpora to do a detailed description of phraseological unit is expressed. A schema of the writing of phraseological dictionary article is proposed. The second part proposes the typology of translation of phraseological units, based on a zoonym. The classification is founded on animal images taking into consideration their semantics. Thus, several methods of translation are distinguished: literal, evaluative and descriptive. At first, the most similar units which can support the literal translation will be described, at the end, typical idioms, having no imagical equivalents and representing considerable difficulties will be seen. The results of the research can be seen as a contribution to the theory of translation of idioms and also considered as a tool in the teaching of foreign languages.