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Linguistics of information and psychological warfare explores various strategies, tactics and methods of information and psychological warfare that are meant to be verbalized in political media discourse. Special importance should be attached to manifold methods of ideological influence and manipulation of public consciousness, among which semantic manipulation represents a subject for particular scrutiny. This method implies “careful selection of words that cause either positive or negative associations and thus affect the overall perception of information”. Obviously, such lexical units that have contextually determined negative or positive connotations and generate corresponding associations include, among others, ideologemes. Thus, ideologically-bound units are an integral linguistic component of information and psychological warfare. Due to their inherent semantic ambivalence and a high degree of associativity, ideologemes become an effective tool of semantic manipulation, which can give a definitive advantage to one of the parties in the ideological struggle. Moreover, ideologemes represent an undeniable challenge for simultaneous interpreters, who turn out to become immediate participants in the unfolding information and psychological war on a par with leading politicians who are supposed to voice the official position of the state.

An ideologically-bound unit is a reference to a specific ideology that exists in the context of a particular epoch, and can be explored as an intrinsic element of the global vertical context. Undoubtedly, ideologemes represent a certain challenge for simultaneous interpreters who are not always able to adequately perceive the global vertical context of the source utterance and to properly convey the associative and connotative potential of these units. The present study is undertaken to pinpoint the peculiarities of the modern American political discourse, namely the public speeches of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and their simultaneous interpretation into Russian, carried out by media interpreters of “Voice of America”, an international multimedia news network of the USA. The research is aimed at identifying and comparing interpreting strategies employed to achieve the required level of rendition appropriateness and usability. The findings further reveal that the global vertical context of the source utterance and the communicative pragmatics of the interpreter-mediated event seem to impact the choice of an interpreting strategy that encompasses specific techniques. It is noteworthy that in order to render an ideologically-bound unit and its derivatives, an interpreter is expected to use corresponding equivalents in the target language, which do not distort the speaker’s intentions and voiced position, as well as convey the communicative effect of the source utterance and fit into the recipient’s ideological picture of the world.

Political media discourse accumulates and creates its own unique field of various vertical context elements, whose connotations, associations and meanings are determined by the communicative situation. The present study is undertaken to explore the functional potential of vertical context elements and examine the impact of its rendition on the quality of simultaneous interpretation. The main functions of vertical context elements in political media discourse prove to be ideological, self-presenting/image-forming and culture-identifying. Being aware of the functional potential of vertical context elements, used in speech not sporadically, but to achieve a specific communicative goal, is crucial to the choice of the appropriate interpreting strategy encompassing relevant techniques for its implementation. The findings further reveal that vertical context elements are characterized by multifunctionality. Moreover, the combination of these functions embodies the communicative intention of the speaker. From the perspective of simultaneous interpreting practice, it seems to be a prerequisite to aspire to determine and render the prevailing function. In political media discourse, the function instrumental in preserving the communicative effect of the source utterance seems to be the ideological one, manifesting itself in its two key varieties, namely manipulative and discrediting. The present research identifies the following extralinguistic factors that impede the proper rendition of the functional potential of vertical context elements: fast or situation-adjusted acceleration of the speaker’s speech rate, excessive redundancy of the source speech, inefficient allocation of attention resources and the mode of simultaneous interpreting..