Thanks largely to the affordances of social media, the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked a glut of neologisms, loan-words, abbreviations, calques and other linguistic variants. The crisis was accompanied in most nations by social measures curtailing what have long been seen as fundamental liberties; hence, it has foregrounded the re-emergence of old controversies about individualism vs collectivism, the nature of personal freedom, the role of the state, the right to healthcare, the distribution of wealth, and so on. On the UK side, our study explores some emergent neologisms in English and Russian, especially implicit meaning in terms like “social distancing” and “lockdown”. We consider cross-cultural implications that relate to the way each national group conceptualized, and lived through, the experiences of lockdown. Linguistic practices may reflect deep-seated habits of being that characterize different countries, and thus our research may shed light on long-standing questions of national stereotypes. We look at some of the Covid-19 neologisms produced and/or used in British and Russian contexts, on the assumption that, by comparing these micro-linguistic practices, it is possible to learn something concerning the cultural realities of the countries in question, along the lines proposed in the works of Hofstede (2001) and Wierzbicka (2003).

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The article illustrates the applied teaching method that helps to eliminate interlingual asymmetries brought about by the differences in the language and conceptional worldviews of the source and target languages (SL, TL). A translation act in a specific communicative situation establishes a contact between SL and TL, which inevitably leads to interference resulting from interlingual contacts and cross-cultural differences. Drawing upon the definition and assessment of interference caused by interlingual asymmetries, the authors offer the ways of eliminating it in translation by making use of interpretive translation transformations. The cases of interlingual asymmetry are illustrated on the examples of translated from English into Russian journalistic texts of political media-discourse, which serve as a teaching material for translators. In rendering denotative and expressive functions – the key functions of the functional style under analysis – the translator resorts to the interpretation of the invariant meaning, which requires moving beyond the structural and semantic parallelism between SL and TL and basing on presupposition knowledge. The comparative analysis carried out by the authors demonstrates that the most common translation techniques are transformations on grammatical and lexical-semantic levels, in addition, explication, or explicitation, and implication of the key features of the described referential situation while switching from SL to TL, the latter presenting the greatest difficulties in translators’ training process.