On the Service Nature of Simultaneous Interpretation — Based on a Critical View of Daniel Gile’s Effort Model

Given the service nature of interpreting and the perspective of communication studies, simultaneous interpretation (SI) proper is considered, first and foremost, a prompt communication service to facilitate the interaction between the speaker and the audience, and then a process of linguistic transformation with the interpreter playing several roles, invisible or visible, within winks of time under pressure.To reveal the mental processing of interpretation, Daniel Gile introduced the Effort Model, which is able to lay bare the mental execution of SI to a great extent and meanwhile account for interpreters’ efforts to handle cognitive loads.Unfortunately, the Model seems to emphasize too much on the linguistic inputs and outputs as well as the invisible role of the interpreter while tends to overlook the essential quality of SI as a communication service and the visible role of the interpreter, thus detrimental to the communication chain of “speakerinterpreterlistener” and the interactive effect between the speaker and the target audience.Therefore, the inclusion of the interpreter’s visible role and awareness of the audience in Gile’s Model seems to be a must for interpreters to better understand the service nature of interpretation, thus helping improve both SI services and linguistic outputs.