The work is devoted to the problem of translation of peripheral phenomena that actively arise in Russian spontaneous everyday speech. In particular, the words istoria (history), tema (theme), moment (moment) and fakt (fact), which are often used in meanings not assigned by traditional dictionaries, are considered. In some contexts, taken from language corpora and separate records of surrounding speech, these words lose the status of a full-fledged significant words and are used as semantically bleached “packaging” words. (Hod'ba na shpil'kah – ne sil'no poleznaya istoria; Tam artroz kakoj-nibud', vospalitel'naya tema). These marginal implementations of the words are not reflected in traditional explanatory and translation dictionaries, however, they require the attention of translators, since, despite their small role in constructing the meaning of the statement, such uses are significant in the context of communication.
As part of the study, a pilot experiment was conducted on a small material in order to establish methods for translating into the Buryat language the desemanticised word istoria, first of all, and semantically bleached tema, moment and fakt. The participants of the experiment are native speakers of the Buryat language who were asked to translate into Buryat a number of Russian utterances, including desemanticised uses of the indicated words. During the analysis of the results, possible ways of translating such uses were identified, and the factors influencing the nature of the translation were described. The involvement of the Buryat language as a target language is connected with the relevance of research into modern Buryat speech and translation issues involving this language.