Indirect translation, as a linguistic and literary phenomenon, is of great interest in terms of linguistic, structural and linguocultural aspects of the languages involved in the translation process. Mediating or indirect translation, despite of being negatively treated both by some scholars and practical translators, remains relevant for the representation of many national literatures, including the Kazakh one. This paper is aimed at conducting a comprehensive and comparative analysis of the translation of a literary piece of fiction to assess the degree of influence of the mediating language on the adequacy and pragmatic equivalence of translation. As an empirical material the authors considered Russian and English variants of translation of the novel by well-known Kazakh writer S. Yelubay Aq Boz Yui . The analysis carried out as part of the study allowed us to come to the conclusion that the Russian translation, which is distinguished by a high degree of skill, recreates the national-historical specificity of the work. This is achieved due to the translator’s knowledge of extralinguistic information. The translation into Russian is dominated by categorical-morphological and pragmatic transformations. The English translation is characterized by lexical transformations. It was also possible to identify inconsistencies caused by structural-stylistic and linguo-culturological differences in the triad of languages under consideration.