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The article is devoted to the results of the Ist International Conference “Linguistics of Distancing: ontology and evolution of language in the time of civilizational shift”. A wide range of issues was raised during the conference. The conference participants — specialists in linguistics, psychology, philology, cultural studies, anthropology, cognitive science, and history — shared their language changes observations. Over the past 50 years, humanity has gone from a global economic boom to a complete break in social groups and entire peoples’ relations, from globalization to regionalization, from world unity to the separation of peoples and cultures. The global coronavirus epidemic has changed the nature of human communication. The desire to expand its horizons remains, and of the available means of knowing the world of people, humanity has very little left — virtual communication channels. And the main thing is that instead of a “fulllength person”, the communication participants received almost one hundred per cent verbal information with nearly zero nonverbal information.

Interpretation as a form of intercultural communication plays an important role in modern geopolitical conditions, hence the role of the interpreter as a mediator between languages and mentalities acquires even greater significance as high-quality interpretation ensures successful international communication. The authors focus on studying simultaneous interpreting as a cognitive process and set the goal of analyzing how the incoming message is perceived and processed in the mind of the interpreter and then transformed into a target language message. Applying the method of comparative cognitive transformation, the authors arrive at the conclusion that, since the interpreter operates on the cognitive level, the process of deverbalizing the source message is a transformation of the ordinary language into a language of thought, thus rendering the gist of the original can be achieved through identifying the underlying concepts in the source language message and finding correlations in the target language. Before attempting to formulate the target message, the interpreter should first deverbalize the original and get rid of its linguistic form, that is, cognitively imagine the sense of the message as a certain space of connections. Effective international communication with the target language recipients means that the interpreter needs to account for the pragmatics of the speech act and find a ready-made concise variant expressing a similar idea in the target language.

In modern translation studies, compression has come to be regarded as a linguistic operation, as a translation strategy. However, the cognitive process that underlies compression has not been taken into consideration. The authors believe that compression is based on selecting a functional equivalent to the source message, provided that the cultural concepts in both languages overlap. Th e article aims at studying compression pragmatically in various types of discourse in the process of simultaneous interpretation. To reach this goal the authors provide an overview of the previous research that facilitates the analysis of compression from the point of view of discourse; study the linguistic basis of compression; and analyze compression from pragmatic and cognitive perspectives. As a result, a model is proposed which presupposes a cognitive selection of a functional equivalent to the source message based on overlapping cultural concepts in two languages. Two principles of interpretation are analyzed: the principle of reproduction is based on a thorough reproduction of all the elements that make up the source message, while the principle of replacement involves selecting a communicatively adequate variant of interpretation that would perform similar functions in the given context. In order to establish correlations between cultural concepts an interpreter has to be well-versed in cultural coordinates system of both languages within a certain discourse. On a lower level of understanding compression is limited to omitting redundant elements and replacing them with more concise versions, lexically and/or syntactically, while preserving the informative components of the message. On a higher level of understanding that appeals to the cultural concepts and the language of thought (mentalese), compression involves selecting a ready-made functional equivalent that already exists in the target language and is normally more concise in form.

The series of articles entitled «An Essay on the History and Hermeneutics ofphilosophy ofFalsafa» is dedicated to the studies of Abu Hamid Muhammad Ibn Muhammad Al- TusT´s work «NasihatAl-Muluk». The Persian philosopher of lth century Al-Ghazali went down in history as one of the brightest representatives of medieval Muslim apologetics. The study of his works allows turning to different aspects of life of the medieval Muslim East. One of´his mostfamousworks, «NasihatAl-Muluk», which is part of his fundamental theological study «The Elixir of Bliss», belongs to the genre of medieval Arabic-Muslim literature — so-called «Mirrors for princes» which are simplified retellings of fundamental philosophical views on state and politics of a certain thinker in plain language. These retellings help to comprehend in practice the essence of government by series of allegories and narratives. The conducted hermeneutical analysis of«Nasihat Al-Muluk» reveals the unique approach of a brilliant Persian philosopher to determination of complicated ethical questions that underlie the art of governing. The methodological approach of the French philosopher and literary critic Roland Barthes was taken as the analysis basis. The first and the second part of the essay contain the history of formation and evolution ofphilosophy ofFalsafa and the exposition of the fundamentals of the hermeneutical teaching of Roland Barthes which underlies the instrumental basis of the analysis.