Abstract
As a part of the reform of its legal system, Japan introduced the citizen-judge system in May 2009. In order to identify possible impacts of interpreter intervention on lay judges, the legal discourse analysis team of the Japan Association of Interpreting and Translation Studies conducted the second mock trial based on a scenario involving a typical injury case. The mock trial focused on an interpreter-mediated prosecutor questioning session, inviting mock
lay judges and two interpreters. This paper picks up some key expressions used in the mock trial to which two interpreters rendered decisively different English translations, such as ‘naguru’ and ‘(kane wo) yokyu suru’, and examines problems concerning the choice of lexis and its legal consequences.
