Reviewed by María Dolores Romero, Madrid, Spain
Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training is the result of a study that included naturalistic, experimental, and theoretical issues in translation studies and related disciplines, especially cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. This book, a revision of the 1995 edition, is written for practitioners who teach conference interpreting and/or translation.
The book is divided into ten chapters. Ch. 1 provides suggestions on how translators and interpreters should carry out their work. This includes a good knowledge of their passive and active languages. In addition, this chapter points out the need for formal training and a process-oriented approach focused on principles, methods, and procedures. In Ch. 2, Gile indicates that the main purpose of professional translation is to help people communicate in specific situations. He also discusses the ways the interests of translators and interpreters might conflict with their clients’.
Ch. 3 investigates aspects of the process of verbalization from a specific idea experimentally and finds that sentences expressing the same message can be quite different. Ch. 4 analyzes discourse comprehension by describing aspects of understanding and its components. The author points out the importance of extralinguistic knowledge for understanding specialized text. In Ch. 5, G presents a sequential model of written translation which consists of a succession of two-phase operations: the comprehension and reformulation phases.
Ch. 6 deals with ad hoc knowledge acquisition in interpreting and translation; this is defined as the acquisition of new knowledge for the purpose of preparing a translation assignment. This chapter also explains important issues in the use of information sources and in strategies for ad hoc knowledge acquisition. The following chapter explains simultaneous interpreting as a set of three core efforts: listening and analysis; production; and short term memory.
Ch. 8 focuses on situations in which interpreters do not understand terms or sentences in the source speech or do not know how to express a concept in the target language, and provides a list of basic tactics to cope with such problems. In Ch. 9, G explains that the formal definitions of the three categories of working languages for conference interpreters established by the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) are not very clear in practice. Moreover this chapter presents concepts and models to resolve problems for interpreting that can also be applied to written translation. In the final chapter G explains the advantages of teaching translation theory to students in the classroom. He concludes with an analysis of the interpretation, decisions, resources, and constraints (IDRC) framework.
Each chapter ends with teaching suggestions, advice on what students need to remember and appendices with exercises for classrooms demonstrations. The book concludes with a glossary of specialized terms.