Hansen, Gyde, Chesterman, andrew, and Gerzymisch-Arbogast, Heidrun, eds (2008): Efforts and Models in Interpreting and Translation Research: A Tribute to Daniel Gile. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 302 p.

The articles are arranged into four sections: “Scientometrics and history,” “Conceptual analysis,” “Research skills” and “Empirical studies,” with the latter (consisting of six articles) being the largest, mirroring Gile’s own passion for empirical work, especially on the subject of conference interpreting. The two articles in the first section lead us appropriately into the Festschrift by underlining Gile’s contribution to Interpreting and Translation Studies in very concrete ways. Nadja Grbić and Sonja Pöllabauer deploy the tools of scientometric analysis to document the quantity, thematic breadth, and impact of Gile’s publications. Franz Pöchhacker outlines the history of the discipline through discussing its “turns,” “traditions,” “shifts” and “paradigms” and drawing attention to the way in which individual scholars like Gile have determined the trajectory of the field. Invoking Mary Snell-Hornby’s taxonomy of scholarly roles (Snell-Hornby 2006), he crowns Gile the “master” of the field of Interpreting Studies. Other articles engage, sometimes quite critically, with theories and methods with which Gile has come to be associated. Andrew Chesterman’s discussion of “The status of interpretive hypotheses,” for instance, starts by gently contesting a claim Gile made in 2005 that research in Translation Studies draws on two main paradigms: that of the liberal arts tradition and that of empirical science. Chesterman argues that the paradigms “might not be so different after all” (p. 49), in that both of them have a place and need for interpretive hypotheses. Unsurprisingly, given the book’s title, one of Gile’s innovations that receives particular attention is his Effort Models (Gile 1995), which are subject to a powerful and well-grounded yet even-handed critique by Anthony Pym. Pym concedes the overall usefulness of Gile’s theory, concluding that – in an era when translators are having to work to ever tighter time constraints – the Effort Models might be more salient to written translation than even Gile himself had assumed. What he takes issue with, though, is the assumption behind the Effort Models that the apparent failures of simultaneous interpreters can be explained principally as a reflection of their incapacity to ensure that the sum-total of their four Efforts (Listening and Analysis, Short-term Memory, Speech Production, and Coordination of the four Efforts) does not exceed their overall processing resources. Pym argues that contextual factors also need to be considered when analysing interpreted output and, with delightful chutzpah, makes his point by reinterpreting data from the very experiment that Gile had used to substantiate an aspect of his Effort Models (p. 90). A less critical view of the Effort Models is evident in Ingrid Kurz’s “The impact of non-native English on students’ interpreting performance,” which reports on a pilot study conducted by one of Kurz’s MA students at the University of Vienna (Kodrnja 2001). Dominika Kodrnja’s thesis had furnished empirical evidence in support of Gile’s hypothesis that “a higher processing capacity is required for comprehension when the speaker has a strong foreign accent” (p. 180). Although Kodrnja’s rigorous methodology is admirable, one wonders whether the findings of the experiment might have been more interesting and more indicative of simultaneous interpreting in general had different participants been chosen. Kodrnja compared the way two groups of five students interpreted the same speech read out in part by an English native speaker and in part by a non-native speaker with a marked foreign accent, and she concluded that both of the groups interpreted much more effectively when their source was the native-speaker. Kurz explains this in Gilean terms as follows: “Too much mental capacity was needed for comprehension (listening and analysis), so that the capacities required for speech processing and speech production were insufficient” (p. 190). This …