Conceptualizing interpreting as communicative mediation. Is interpreting only a skill of cognitive processing?

While the mainstream pedagogy of interpreting training has always focused on the training of cognitive processing skills,this article argues that interpreting competence requires more than cognitive processing skills. As an activity of interpersonal interaction and intercultural communication performed by the interpreter to facilitate communication across languages,interpreting also requires interlingual communicative mediation skills. Taking stock of representative researches from this perspective,including court interpreting studies,medical interpreting studies and sign-language interpreting studies,this article proposes a framework for conceptualising interpreting as communicative mediation,which can feed into the development of interpreting training pedagogy.