How Interpreters Work Good morning. Today I'd like to give you a brief introduction to an interpreter's work. Generally speaking, an interpreter has to fulfill three stages during his work: the understanding of the speaker's original message, the memorization of a speech and the re-expression of the same content in another language, with the help of some notes the interpreter writes down upon hearing the original message. The first stage is the understanding. The understanding we refer to here is not of words but of ideas, since an interpreter has to convey concepts. But what happens if an interpreter doesn't know one word or an expression that he or she hears in a speech? First of all we can underline that an interpreter can understand a speaker's meaning without actually understanding every single word and expression used.