Names have an artistic and cultural-historical value: they carry out important artistic and ideological functions in the artistic text, reveal author's worldview, participate in the display of reality belonging to a certain epoch. In the article, the names of the main characters of the story - Preobrazhensky, Shvonder and Sharikov - are considered from the point of view of their significance and sense-forming function, and also individual urbanonyms are analyzed, in particular, street names and city institutions that have a bright national and cultural coloring and perform an associative-symbolic function. The proper names of the characters of the story serve as a source of information for the reader about the author's relationship to his heroes. This, in particular, concerns the names of Preobrazhensky, indicating the essence and purpose of his experimental work, and Sharik / Sharikov, which, as a dog's nickname, associates with a well-fed domestic dog, and in combination with the form of treatment "gentleman" becomes a way of expressing irony. Translation by transcription as the most common in the transfer of Russian names to Chinese is acceptable in those cases when it is already either covered by tradition, if it is a question of the previously translated names of prominent political figures ( Marx, Kautsky ). This also applies to the names of characters who do not have a special meaning in the text ( Polozov, Vyazemskaya ). Translation by the transcription method of the professor's name is extremely inadequate: the semantics of "transformation, improvement of the world and man" and allusion to the Orthodox holiday of Transfiguration of the Lord are lost. On the other hand, the names of city realities also contain cultural and background information, which is not always transparent to representatives of another culture - for example, connected with the image of the Prechistenskaya star, which symbolizes the birth of the Messiah. In translation, this urbanonymus is deprived of the connotative-symbolic function assigned to him by the author, which allows us to state significant meaningful losses. Identifying the role of proper names is carried out against the background of their correspondences in the text of the translation into Chinese, which makes it possible to see that in translating a story into another language, the functions of proper names are not always obvious to the reader, and sometimes the author's intentions are blurred.