Communication Across Cultures

While the literature on either contrastive linguistics or discourse analysis has grown immensely in the last twenty years, very little of it has ventured into fusing the two perspectives. Bearing in mind that doing discourse analysis without a contrastive base is as incomplete as doing contrastive analysis without a discourse base, the specific aim of this book is to argue that translation can add depth and breadth to both contrastive linguistics as well as to discourse analysis. Authentic data from both spoken and written English is used throughout to add clarity to theoretical insights gained from the study of discourse processing. Each aspect of the model proposed for the analysis of texts is related separately to a problem of language processing and in domains as varied as translation, interpreting, language teaching etc. The global objectives pursued in this volume are the training of future linguists and the sensitization of users of language in general to the realities of discourse.

Basil Hatim is Director of Studies for Arabic at Heriot-Watt University and Principal Lecturer on the Master programme in English/Arabic Translation and Interpreting. He has lectured widely in translation theory at universities throughout the UK, Europe and the Middle East, and published extensively on the applications of text linguistics to translation theory and practice.