The article focuses on the translation strategies of charactonyms in The History of a Town by the Russian writer Mikhail Yevgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin and the novel The Monikins by the American writer James Fennimore Cooper. The paper represents an infrequent case of comparing the ways of rendering names in the translations from Russian into English and from English into Russian, that additionally promotes to literary onomastics studies. The article compares the onomastic spaces in the Russian and American works, the types of charactonyms and equivalents in the translations. The key method of the research has been the analysis of onomastic space. The performed analysis, defined further in the paper, has allowed distributing the translated names into usual and occasional equivalents.