The article is devoted to the problems of translating the argot lexicon from the point of view of translating the specific argotic worldview. Researchers rightly speak about the multifunctional potential of argotic vocabulary in a literary text, its diverse aesthetic possibilities to be a social identifier, a cultural and household detail, a means of recreating a certain historical epoch, to represent a vivid expressive and stylistic means. Argoticism can often act as an invective, understood as a cultural phenomenon of social discrediting of a subject through a text addressed to him, as well as a stable language turnover, perceived in a particular cultural tradition as offensive to its addressee. The paper considers the functioning of argotisms in a fiction text on the example of A. and G. Wainer’s novel «The Age of Mercy» translated into French. The results of comparison of the original and translated texts show their communicative and functional unequal significance due to multiple losses of culturally specific meanings of Russian argotisms in translation.
