The success of cross-cultural online communication in an academic environment is defined by the degree of student involvement in such an interaction. The authors' experience testifies that a number of objective, language, and psychological factors may decrease the activeness of these interactions, and as a result learning may not be effective for students in these types of cross-cultural interactions. Among such factors the current article investigates the influence of a communicator's speech peculiarities on a recipient's willingness to maintain interaction in native-to-nonnative, written online communication in the English language. The study was aimed at verifying a hypothesis about the influence of Russian communicants' speech characteristics on American communicants' willingness to maintain conversations. The research method chosen was content analysis. Thematic chats involving Russian and American students participating in the Global Understanding course were analyzed. The results of the content analysis allowed us to distinguish certain Russian communicants' written speech characteristics, such as the prevalence of language and grammar mistakes, the degree of vocabulary richness, and the use of complex sentences. Significant correlations were discovered between the American communicants' willingness to maintain conversations and the number of mistakes, indicators of lexical richness and scarcity in Russian communicants' utterances. Language and speech mistakes as well as the quantity of words in the utterances of micro themes had the highest number of significant correlations with indicators of the willingness to maintain conversations. The first factor, language and speech mistakes, decreased the willingness to maintain conversations, whereas the second factor, the number of words in Russian students' utterances, increased such willingness.

The article discusses some of the features of teaching translation in regional higher educational institutions. The factors influencing the organization of the learning process are considered, and the possibilities of using modern approaches in the preparation of professional translators are analyzed. Today, life itself dictates the need to create a new system of personal and professional development of modern specialists in the field of intercultural communication. The following factors can be identified as the main ones affecting the efficiency and success of the educational process: geographical, social and economic and educational. Geographic refers to the growing number of universities that train translators not in the capital but in regional higher educational institutions. Higher educational institutions, which yesterday were technical, economic and even agricultural have recently received the status of universities and today are actively engaged in the training of future translators. Under the socio-economic component, the problem of the material and technical base of the university and the provision of such faculties and departments with qualified specialists is considered. Educational factor means the level of foreign language proficiency and it should be mentioned that it is not enough profound for translation activity. The training of translators is based on the position that training in translation and interpretation should be carried out by different methods. It is necessary to provide practice in this activity to each student Practice shows that significant difficulties in teaching translation arise due to a lack of understanding of the textual nature of the translation process, due to the inability to isolate nationally specific features, and also due to insufficient knowledge of the algorithm of translation actions. Therefore, from the very beginning, the training of future translators should be aimed at the formation of professional translation competence. The inclusion of the educational process in real life, allows the teacher to demonstrate clearly what the knowledge and training in the classroom turned out to be successful and useful, and what needs correction and improvement for successful work.

The paper describes the design and development of a training simulator in the NetBeans integrated environment in the Java programming language. The simulator program articulates questions of three levels of complexity, methodological recommendations and theoretical issues on the topic. The developed software product is implemented in the corresponding distance learning course on the Moodle platform and is recommended for use in the educational process by applicants in the "Computer Science" specialty.

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