The paper investigates the colour terms in the translation perspective. Poetic material presented by the works of the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (The Revolt of Islam, The Sensitive Plant, Ginevra, Marenghi, The Cloud, To the Jane: The Recollection, The Cenci: A Tragedy in Five Acts. Dedication, to Leigh Hunt Esquire, Arethusa, England in 1819, A Vision of The Sea, Ode to The West Wind) served as a resource for sampling colouristic vocabulary in English, and translations of these works by K. D. Balmont in Russian. For the irst time, a complex description of colour terms in the poetic texts of P. B. Shelley is presented, their classiication is performed, and the features of their functioning are described. Theoretical and practical conclusions about the quantitative prevalence of chromatic units over the achromatic, nominative over the colorators, unmotivat-ed colouristic vocabulary over the motivated, main colour namings over the mixed, complex and referential, means that the linguocolour world view of the poet mostly consists of bright, and at the same time simple, easily comprehen- sible language units. This study extends knowledge about the linguocolour world view of Shelley and expands the idea about the aesthetics of the vocabulary of colour terms in poetic texts. The small number of individual author colour namings casts doubt on the soundness of their main status. The quantitative data of a comparative analysis of creative approaches and translatological solutions of the colour designation class by K. D. Balmont revealed the tools of translation transformations: literal translation, omission and remetaphorization/metaphorization. It must be noted that the texts created by the author of the translation have had a similar effect on the addressee, as it had on the original one. It means that a communicative-functional equivalence has been achieved when creating texts in Russian. With this in mind a translator can save his time and concentrate on solving non-trivial tasks.