Communication Across Cultures

I was pleased to learn that the influential text Communication Across Cultures by Basil Hatim will soon be available in a second, updated edition. Having worked in Bible translation in various African cross-cultural settings for over 50 years, I have found myself returning to this book (now over two decades in print) on many occasions in order to revisit its corpus of pertinent topics.

All those who are in any way interested, or involved in the many interrelated fields of communication strategy, translation studies, discourse linguistics, and literary theory that are expounded by this book will, along with me, eagerly look forward to it.

Professor Ernst R. Wendland, Stellenbosch University

By drilling down to the actual linguistic consequences of speakers’ and writers’ intentions and inferences, Basil Hatim achieves much more than many other works on cross-cultural communication. I am deeply impressed with this volume and utterly convinced by it.

Ian Mason, Professor Emeritus, Heriot-Watt University

Basil Hatim has produced another gem of a book. This new edition is a carefully considered rewriting of a title that will surely appeal to a wide audience. It will surely become a major work in textual analysis for translation and shows all the verve and precision that characterise Hatim’s other writing.

Jeremy Munday, Professor of Translation Studies, University of Leeds

A revised edition of this excellent volume is long overdue.
The structure of the revised edition is very user-friendly, and this edition will surely be very successful indeed. The book still shows that translation studies can make considerable use of textlinguistics, pragmatics, cultural studies, and above all semiotics. Hatim still argues enthusiastically for a textual theory, textual competence, and text-sensitive translation, interpreting and general applied linguistics.
The revised edition will be a valuable source and resource for a diverse audience, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, teachers, and all those interested in communication across cultures as texts.

Professor Said Faiq, American University of Sharjah

Translation is translating culture. Indeed, what else other than translating and translation could best exemplify communication across cultures? ... A reflection of his genuine understanding of the sociotextual values of Arabic counter-argumentation, opposition to indiscriminate rendering into Arabic through-argumentation, and hope for open-mindedness in Arabic rhetoric.

Raymond Wai-man Ng
Linguistics and the Human Sciences

(An) illuminative contribution to applied linguistics, language teaching, literary criticism, translation, and cultural studies. 

Kexin Du
Babel

Preface (R R K Hartmann)
A New Introduction - Textual Rhetoric: The Missing Dimension
Translator decision-making informed by textual competence
Deeper text processing
The myth of the single register: a discourse perspective on linguistic variation
Argumentation: a contrastive text-type perspective
A model of argumentation from Arabic Rhetoric
Globalization, academic writing, translation: a new perspective on culture
Cultures within cultures: commodification discourse
On purpose
The status of the paragraph as a unit of text structure
Signalling background information in expository texts
On the interface between structure and texture: the textual progression of Themes and Rhemes
A text-type solution to a problem of texture: translating Cataphora
Degree of explicitness as a feature of texture
Emotiveness and its linguistic realization in texts
Translating direct and indirect speech and the dynamics of news reporting
A text-type perspective on the pragmatics of politeness
Cultures in contact and what people do with their texts: an applied- linguistic perspective
The discourse of alienation and its linguistic expression in a modern Arabic novella
The translation of irony: a discourse focus on Arabic
The other texts: implications for liaison Interpreting
References
Resources
Glossary of Terms in Contrastive Text Linguistics and Translation

Basil Hatim is Professor in the Department of Arabic Studies at the American University of Sharjah. He has lectured widely in translation theory at universities throughout the UK, Europe and the Middle East, and has published extensively on the applications of text linguistics to translation theory and practice.