ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the practice of public service interpreting in court in face-to-face interaction and how it is conditioned by legal rights, judicial traditions, translation norms and discourse conventions that differ between countries and jurisdiction. The chapter provides an overview of the research literature on court, drawing on a range of overlapping disciplines, including interpreting studies, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of language and law (forensic linguistics). Two critical issues are examined in detail, namely the identification and choice of languages and their permeability in bilingual interaction, as well as the interpreter’s treatment of person deixis and marking of participant roles, which is subject to specialized translation norms.
