This book explores the responsibilities of the interpreter and the expectations of both the interpreter and of other participants involved in the interaction. It examines ways of understanding the distribution of responsibility of content and the progression of talk in interpreter-mediated institutional face-to-face encounters in the community-interpreting context. Bringing attention to discursive and social practices prominent in modern society, the book describes and explains real-life interpreter- mediated conversations. This data shows that the interpreter's prescribed role as a non-participating, non-person does not -and cannot- always hold true. C. Wadensjö explains and applies a bakhtinian dialogic theory of language and mind, and offers an alternative understanding of the interpreter's task as one consisting of translating and co-ordinating and of the interpreter as an engaged actor solving problems of translatability and problems of mutual understanding in situated social interactions.