Russian Language and Culture in Indirect Translation from English into Kazakh

Typically, translation process involves two languages and two lingua-cultural traditions. In Kazakhstan, the situation in the field of literary translation is really specific: it is an indisputable fact that in translation from Kazakh into English and vice versa, Russian language works as a mediator due to the long-standing tradition of Kazakh-Russian/Russian-Kazakh translation; so, an intermediary role of Russian culture for rendering English texts into Kazakh is self-evident. Historically, Russian has become the second language for most of the Kazakh people; as a result, Russian language and culture are perceived as connatural phenomena as well as an important source for getting information. Moreover, Russian language and culture work as a cultural bridge between source (European) and target (Asian) cultures, particularly in course of translating from English into Kazakh. Therefore, the mediating role in indirect translation should be considered as one of Russian language functions; the authors developed a model of interaction between English, Russian, and Kazakh cultures in the process of indirect translation. So, the main peculiar features of indirect translation from English into Kazakh via Russian and corresponding cultural implications are considered the topical object of our research; the appropriate qualitative method represented by pre-translation text analysis, lingua-cultural interpretation of the texts has been used.