/in terr"pri teuhr/ , n.
1. a person who interprets.
2. a person who provides an oral translation between speakers who speak different languages.
3. Computers.
a. hardware or software that transforms one statement at a time of a program written in a high-level language into a sequence of machine actions and executes the statement immediately before going on to transform the next statement. Cf. compiler (def. 2).
b. an electromechanical device that reads the patterns of holes in punched cards and prints the same data on the cards, so that they can be read more conveniently by people.
[ 1350-1400; ME interpretour 2 ]