The article is devoted to the identification and analysis of ethnographic lacunae in the works of Chyngyz Aitmatov and in the epic Manas, as well as to examining the ways in which these elements are rendered in translation from Kyrgyz into Russian. The study identifies key types of ethnoculturally marked vocabulary, including kinship-social, ritual, sacred, mythological, and everyday components, as well as realities of traditional nomadic culture. The analysis demonstrates that a significant number of such units lack direct equivalents in the Russian language, which leads to situations of partial or complete untranslatability, where national and cultural content cannot be conveyed by the means of another language in an equivalent volume. A comparison of the original texts with their translations reveals the predominance of strategies such as neutralization, descriptive explanation, and generalization, which often weaken the cultural density of the text. At the same time, methods such as transliteration and calquing make it possible to preserve ethnographic features and the semantic depth of the original more accurately. The results obtained confirm that the transmission of the national coloring of Kyrgyz-language texts requires a culture-oriented approach and careful consideration of the traditional worldview reflected in lacunar units.