In cross-examination, witnesses’ face is frequently threatened by legal professionals.
Face-threatening acts (Brown/Levinson 1987) are considered powerful institutional tools
for lawyers; however, in a bilingual courtroom where all the interactions are mediated by
a third party, the interpreter, this is often complicated. Drawing on a small-scale corpus,
five bilingual moot court cross-examinations interpreted by Interpreting and Translation
(I&T) Master’s students at UNSW Sydney, this paper investigates facework strategies
embedded in cross-examining questions and in their Mandarin interpretation based on
Penman’s (1990) facework schema. More specifically, it examines the way facework strategies
are used in cross-examination questions, the extent to which they are maintained or
modified in the interpretation, and how that may affect the pragmatics of the courtroom
questions. The findings contribute to a better understanding of the pragmatics of interpreted
courtroom questions and to legal interpreter training.
