This work focuses on community interpreting in the pediatric section of a primary care health facility and the nature of the interpreter-mediated medical discourse that takes place between English-speaking resident and attending physicians and the Spanish-speaking patients' mothers. This is a quantitative discourse analysis carried out by expanding on categories proposed in previous work by Wadensjö (1992, 1998) and refined herein. The analysis revealed that: 1) The conduit model of interpreting, which is the basis for traditional error analysis, lacks sufficient detail to reflect the complexities of interpreter mediated discourse in community settings; and 2) the interpreter is a full-fledged participant in the discourse whose responsibilities lie in the skopos of the interpreted speech event and in the expectations that the primary parties bring with them to the medical encounter.