The author's aim with the R & D project that is presented in this article is to make another contribution to public service interpreting research. They use a contrastive approach, based on two dimensions, time and space, and they try to identify and analyse disparities and similarities between different historical periods and geographical areas. The historical perspective addresses, on the one hand, the Spanish colonial period (16th and 17th centuries), and, on the other, two periods of our recent history: the 1950s to the 1980s and our present time. Geographically, the first examples refer to Spanish colonial America, although the authors also mention their roots in medieval Spain. The contemporary survey is applied to three countries, Germany, Italy and Spain, which have had different migration trends during the last fifty years or so.