Interpreting Cantonese utterance-final particles in bilingual courtroom discourse

This paper examines an unusual feature of spoken Cantonese — the utterance-final particle — to see how it is deployed and rendered by interpreters in courtroom discourse. The data is based on five rape trials heard in the Hong Kong courtrooms. It is a known fact that different participants in the courtroom construct their version of the truth utilizing different linguistic devices. However, different language systems have different linguistic phenomenon which may be common in one language but non-existent in another. Utterance particle is one of those unique language devices in Cantonese which is not available in English. Court interpreters often find themselves facing the task of maintaining the coherence and modality of all the participants’ languages while interpreting for these different language systems.