There are programming languages and machine code. Your computer can only understand machine code, so in order to run a program, you need to translate the code you wrote in a programming language into machine code.

There are two ways two do this. Compiling your code means that all the code you wrote is analyzed and translated into machine code ahead of time, so everything is ready when it’s time to run your program. Interpreting means that your code is being translated line by line as it’s being run.