Whether working with hard-of- hearing elderly patients, dealing with distorted communication in psychiatry or speech pathology, interpreting a highly charged police interview or cross-examination, handling a business negotiation where never saying no can still mean no, dealing with idiolects in spoken or signal communication, or establishing rapport in a counseling or psychotherapeutic session, interpreters are faced with a host of different demands that they can meet by using the various controls available to them from establishing teamwork to check on comprehension, re-ordering the environment or requesting respite (Dean & Pollard 2011). Codes of interpreting ethics do not demand that interpreters absent themselves from handling these situations, but specify that they must not retreat from conveying completely what each party communicates. The complex roles of the interpreter can be defined without recourse to concepts of visibility or invisibility. This article is a discussion on ideas found in recognisable texts on interpreting.