LINGUOCULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN MEDICAL ADVERTISING IN ENGLISH AND RUSSIAN

The article examines linguocultural differences in English- and Russian-language medical advertising as manifestations of culturally shaped models of persuasion, authority, patient agency and health-related value. Medical advertising is treated as a hybrid discourse in which institutional medical knowledge is reformulated through commercial, pragmatic and multimodal strategies. The study applies contrastive linguocultural, pragmatic and discourse-analytical methods to recent research on pharmaceutical and medical advertising, with particular attention to studies published within the last decade. The English-language material is interpreted primarily through the well-documented U.S. direct-to-consumer advertising tradition, while the Russian-language material draws on studies of Russian print and digital medical advertising. The comparison shows that English-language advertising more consistently constructs an active patient-consumer through second-person address, imperatives, self-management narratives and individualized benefit framing. Russian-language medical advertising, while also persuasive and consumer-oriented, more visibly relies on professional authority, institutional trust, accessible medical terminology, precedent phenomena and close interaction between verbal and visual components. The two traditions share the strategic simplification of specialized knowledge and the combination of rational and emotional appeals, but they differ in how responsibility, credibility and social relations are linguistically organized. These differences are especially significant for translation, localization and ethically responsible cross-cultural medical communication.