Communication Across Cultures, Hatim B., 2006.
Both contrastive linguistics and text linguistics are now truly in their prime; witness the conferences at Innsbruck on New Departures in Contrastive Linguistics in 1991 and at Brighton on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics earlier this year, or the 4-volume Handbook of Discourse Analysis edited by T.A. van Dijk (1985). However, the combination of the two perspectives (the contrastive and the textual), for which some of us have been pleading for many years (I suggested the term ‘contrastive textology’ in 1980), and whose computational implementation is now feasible, is only just beginning. A further development, the application of contrastive text linguistics to translation studies, is long overdue.
Basil Hatim’s book not only addresses all these issues and controversies, but exemplifies them through the prism of Arabic, a language that has enjoyed a long and distinguished rhetorical tradition, but not the benefit of much modern theoretical work. The author is well qualified to undertake this difficult but exciting task. Ever since the days of his Exeter PhD he has explored the relevance of contrastive discourse analysis to English-Arabic translation and demonstrated it in his practical teaching.
