The aim of this paper is to hypothesize that issues of politeness and other interactional pragmatic variables are crucial to an understanding of what is involved in dialogue interpreting events; and to illustrate what is at stake by reference to an instance of courtroom interpreting (during the OJ Simpson trial) and instances of immigration service interviews. In these triadic speech events, which inherently contain a degree of threat to face, it is found that face-threatening acts are frequently modified in the act of translating, irrespective of the style of interpreting adopted.