The paper describes different approaches to lexical and grammatical transformations in modern translation studies. It sheds new light on traditional approaching Chinese translation studies. Using experience of teaching students studying the French and the German languages the authors provide several reasons for proposing the Russian traditional classifications of lexical and grammatical transformations into courses of translation from Chinese practical. According to this approach, there are such types of transformations as lexical and grammatical, as well as complex (or mixed) ones. Such consistent and universal perspective is aimed to help students to understand grammatical and lexical asymmetry of the source and the target languages and it can be of great use in writing research papers.