Who is ‘you’?: Polite forms of address and ambiguous participant roles in court interpreting

This paper investigates the use of forms of address by court interpreters, combining a participation framework approach to dialogue interpreting with a sociolinguistic analysis of intra-speaker variation. Based on transcripts from interpreter-mediated court proceedings in New York City, the paper explores how interpreters respond when the participant status of their target recipients changes from addressee to unaddressed overhearer. The interpreters are found to design their utterances primarily to conform to institutional norms and not to the expectations of target recipients, who rely on politeness features as cues for their participant status. Adding to recent research on discourse processes in dialogue interpreting, the paper explores how the interpreter’s task becomes more complex when more than two primary participants are present.