In this article the author examines the models in interpreting. He defines interpreting as “a complex and unique activity whose social, cognitive, and linguistic features are not captured in any existing discipline”. The models so far proposed have emphasized either its relational aspects, as a social communication service, or its individual performance as a complex cognitive and linguistic operation, and have accordingly drawn on different disciplines in the humanities and cognitive sciences. Such models have been based on a mixture of intuition from personal experience, imported theory, and inference from experiments, performance data, surveys or interviews, and, to some extent, neuroimaging. Models of interpreting fall into two broad categories. Relational models try to capture the pattern of interactions in interpreted events, from a single interview to an entire conference, while cognitive process models focus on the mental activity of the individual interpreter.