When it comes to the management of cultural differences, interpreting scholars agree the interpreter has some role as a cultural mediator, yet other sources privilege the interpreter as conduit model. To see how this duty of cultural brokering works in pratice and hypothesising that globalisation has reduced cultural differences, I interviewed users of interpreter services at the HUG. They were asked what cultural differences they saw with patients in interpreter-mediated encounters and broader questions to elucidate whether they saw interpreters as cultural mediators and whether changes in technology were impacting interpreter-mediated encounters. The results show that cross-cultural communication barriers seem to stem much more from the conjunction of individual traits of all participants and that cultural differences have not disappeared with time, but rather changed with new patient profiles. Clinicians confirmed the limited role of interpreters as cultural mediators at the HUG, but trusted interpreters - much more than technology - for linguistics purposes.