Workshop for Legal Language Professionals – “Tag Questions Are Easy To Interpret, Aren’t They?”: Tackling Tag Questions in Court Interpreting

In this series of workshops, the Graduate Diploma in Legal Translation at McGill University invites you to discover different dimensions of professions at the crossroad of law and languages. We offer both introductory workshops to key professions, such as legal translation and court interpreting, as well as workshops on highly specialized issues that will better meet the needs of experienced jurilinguists.

In this workshop, we will focus on tag questions in legal and court interpretation.

Tag questions, those short fragments added to the end of a sentence like isn’t it?, weren’t you? or don’t you think?, are common in courtroom discourse, particularly in cross-examination. They can be deceptively complex: part question, part accusation and often infused with subtlety or pressure. Relying systematically on n’est-ce pas to render them in French fails to capture that complexity.

This interactive workshop is designed for French↔English court interpreters. Participants will explore how tag questions function in English legal discourse, how they differ from equivalent structures in French and how to convey their tone and intent more precisely.