Towards a Typology of Courtroom Questions In English with Reference to Translation

Abstract

This study is an investigation into questions in English legal discourse. It attempts at categorizing questions in varied police and court interviews. Such interviews are considered to be a speech event in which questions are discrete speech acts grouped into act sequences. It is found that questions involve six broad categories arranged according to how far they restrict witnesses in their answer. They are given in order from the least restrictive to the most restrictive. On the other hand, translating questions in courtrooms requires sometimes some sort of intervention on the part of translators to prevent loss of meaning in the translation resulting from linguistic discrepancies between English and Arabic.