Searching for Evidence of Gile’s Effort Models in Retrospective Protocols of Trainee Simultaneous Interpreters

Abstract

The aim of this study is to find empirical evidence for Gile’s Effort Models through retrospection. The main objective is to investigate simultaneous interpreting trainees’ perception of the cognitive processes underlying the SI task, their decision-making process when faced with increased cognitive load and processing capacity saturation, as well as their coping mechanisms under the constraints of constant requirement of attentional resources allocation. The study triangulates process analysis (retrospective protocols) with product analysis (manual comparison of source and target texts). The corpus of the study consists of about 75 hours of recordings of 240 interpreting outputs in both directions of interpreting (Polish-English and English-Polish) and the recordings of retrospective protocols (5,005 remarks). The analysed retrospective comments provide evidence of the conflicting efforts and problems with processing capacity management described by Gile. The total of 531 verbalisations refer to the aspects related to Gile’s Effort Models and 108 out of 120 interpreters participating in this experiment made at least one remark reporting them, which clearly confirms Gile’s observations about the nature of the simultaneous interpreting process.