Culture as a way of bringing meaning into life is maintained through discourse. In search of factors influencing discourse effectiveness, this volume brings together young scholars from Russia, France, Pakistan, Slovakia and Lebanon to focus on variation as an essential feature of meaning producing communication, in its multiple aspects and settings. The book is based on papers presented during online sessions on cross-cultural discourse, literary analysis and language education of the 7th International Young Researchers Conference “Studying and Teaching Philology” held in Ulyanovsk, Russia, in 2017. In Part I, Irina Zhuchkova explores variation in academic discourse on discourse. In the first two chapters of Part II Hibah Shabkhez discusses the interaction of various culture codes and transformations of a literary character travelling from one fictional world into another, and, in the next chapter, Hibah Shabkhez, Ibreez Shabkhez and Azka Mahboob analyse the divergence of stances taken on the same character by its creator and the readers. In the final chapters of this section, Ibreez Shabkhez and Maksim Duleba uncover mechanisms of expressing conflicting stances, with the result of marginalising discourse participants, including the stance-taker himself. Roksolana Povoroznyuk in Part III examines the interpreter’s choices in mediating cross-cultural literary discourse, concentrating on paratranslational techniques and terminological variation, both of which involve a lot of translatorial freedom and responsibility. Finally, Part IV by Christelle Frangieh Fenianos addresses the issue of the second language learner’s freedom in choosing the ways of acquiring vocabulary, which serves as a gate to the world of cross-cultural communication. This book will be of interest to researchers, postgraduate students and advanced undergraduates working in the fields of philology, discourse analysis, literature and translation studies, and language acquisition.