The article is devoted to the determining of the volume, composition and principles of lexicographic description of Belarusian and Swedish proverbs in a bilingual dictionary, which is intended for Belarusians studying Swedish as a foreign language. The study showed that the optimal volume of the Belarusian-Swedish dictionary of proverbs should not be less than 500 units of the input language and 1,100 units of the output language. The dictionary should include, first of all, functionally active proverbs in the Belarusian language. The main principle for determining the composition of Belarusian proverbs and their Swedish equivalents in a bilingual translation dictionary is the “principle of completeness of dictionary units”, which most closely corresponds to the variety of requests of its users and various aspects of translation of proverbs. This principle involves a description in the dictionary of all formal variants and all synonyms of both the input language and the output language. In this case, the formal versions of Swedish proverbs should be described in the dictionary as separate units. To select proverbs of the input language, the typological criterion of their generality and specificity in relation to other languages, including Swedish, is also important. Therefore, it is important to include in the dictionary all universal proverbs and functionally active international proverbs, as well as the inclusion in the dictionary of all specific Belarusian proverbs (which have no analogues in European languages) without exception
The article is devoted to identifying of general patterns and distinctive features in the structure, meaning and evaluation of stable verbal complexes of comparative semantics of the Swedish and Russian languages with a component-demonym. Stable verbal complexes of comparative semantics with a demonic component are present in both the Swedish and Russian languages. There is a significant quantitative disproportion between stable comparisons and paremias of comparative semantics of both languages, but in the Swedish language in favor of proverbs, and in Russian — in favor of stable comparisons. It can be assumed that the names of evil spirits are more taboo in Swedish stable comparisons, and also comparative phraseological units in general were less subject to lexicographic fixation. The studied proverbs of the Swedish and Russian languages are quantitatively comparable. Structurally, the similarity of the proverbs of the two languages is manifested in the presence of such models as sentences with opposition introduced by adversative conjunctions, and sentences with the presence of a component in the comparative degree. But the analyzed Swedish proverbs are characterized by such models as sentences with adjacent components, identity sentences and sentences built according to the syntactic model “better… than…”, which are absent in the studied material of the Russian language. In turn, in the analyzed Russian proverbs one can note models that are absent in Swedish ones: sentences built on the principle of syntactic parallelism and collapsed comparison