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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.