The aim of this thesis is to examine a special field of translation studies, idioms. I lay emphasis on the problems emerging in translating idioms and the ways they can be solved. My corpus is taken from Chapter 3 (“A Sour Meal”) of the novel Édes Anna by DEZSŐ KOSZTOLÁNYI and its English translation by GEORGE SZIRTES. In the first part of my thesis I deal with the basic theoretical background of idiomatic phrases and make an attempt to clarify the concept of transfer operations, I present the main approaches related to the translation process. Since idioms are lexical items, I pay attention to lexical transfer operations and total transformation in particular. After that, I deal with the types of fixed expressions, namely, collocations, idioms and formulae as these categories cover expressions which operate in specific situations and it is essential to make a distinction between them. Above all, I present two main theories related to the question of translatability and untranslatability of idioms. One of them form a part of VILEN NAUMOVICH KOMISSAROV’s theory about equivalence in translation. The other one is proposed by Mona Baker, who details the difficulties of translation of idioms and offers strategies to solve them. In the second part of my thesis I present a case study on Chapter 3 (“A Sour Meal”) of KOSZTOLÁNYI’s Édes Anna and its English translation. In this part I classify idioms found in the two texts according to the theories I introduced above and I examine the difficulties of their translation and the solutions the translator applied. My aim is to reveal what the translator has been motivated by in his choices and I would also like to refer to some other solutions that could have been made.