This paper discusses the nature of the criteria or norms governing the court interpreter’s translation strategies. The material comes from two criminal lawsuits in Holland. The starting point is the hypothesis that the tension between institutional discourse and everyday speech in court has a direct bearing on translational criteria and strategies. The description shows, among other things, that the interpreter tends to simplify the institutional discourse when translating to the defendant, and renders the speech of the non-professional participant in a standardized manner. Theories of discourse and conversation analysis, the sociology of interaction and of law, as well as translation and interpreting theory, are relevant to analyses of this type.