The tempo of modern living picks up day by day and the representatives of various professions should learn new information coming in various languages, including rare languages, from different parts of the world. Translators find themselves in the conditions of the necessity of more quick and qualitative translation what is not always possible when translating the rare language pair. The paper covers special aspects of appropriate translation using the intermediate language, which is required to increase the speed and the quality of translation from rare languages. Usually, the official international language (English) acts as the intermediate language, but other variants are possible as well. The paper describes as an example the experience of translation from Chinese to Russian using English as the intermediate language. The authors distinguished some special aspects of such translation. The experience of translation of Chinese novels from English (intermediate language) into Russian allowed the authors to find out that when working with the intermediate language, it is necessary to follow not only the general norms and rules of translation but some identified special aspects as well. The authors noted that while working with the intermediate language, a translator should take into account three cultural patterns (including various historical allusions) performed in three languages involved in the translation; select an appropriate translation strategy for appropriate translation of units of measure; take into account the specifics of proper names, which have not got any analogues in the intermediate and translating languages; give special attention to the use of both lexical and grammatical transformations.