Maria V. Mikhailovskaia

In recent decades, irony has become an integral part of Russian political discourse. It becomes abundantly clear that ironic retorts do not appear randomly in speech as a result of the speaker’s excessive emotionality but are used as a stimulus to provoke the desired reaction and form a particular attitude to certain issues, as part of a meticulously elaborated strategy. The units with ironic potential thus become a way of manifesting the speaker’s linguistic personality and a tool of manipulation. The present study is undertaken to explore vertical context elements as means of expressing irony in contemporary Russian political discourse and to examine the impact of their rendition on the quality of simultaneous interpretation. The findings further reveal that vertical context elements, such as allusions, quotations, realia and ideologemic combinations, are capable of producing and intensifying the ironic effect. As has been shown, the ways in which the ironic potential of the source utterance is realised, whether through elements of the vertical context or through traditional techniques and mechanisms, cause significant difficulties in simultaneous interpretation due to different language worldviews, cognitive baggage and dissimilar perception of the means of irony expression by representatives of Russian and English-speaking linguistic cultures. Among other mentally demanding tasks, the interpreter has to recognise irony and its components in time to make an appropriate interpreting decision that will help to recreate the communicative effect of the source utterance.