Contrastive genre-analysis of English and Arabic Dis-course : lmplications for Tetl and translation

Abstract EN

This paper sets out to ascertain whether or not texts representing the same genres in English and Arabic have the same or very similar cognitive structure.

To this effect, six Arabic texts, three representing the promotional genre and the other three exemplifying the academic genre are analyzed and compared with Bhatia's (1993) analysis of similar genre-texts' The present findings demonstrate that texts representing the same genre have very similar cognitive structure, yet they display some differences across different cultures and within the same culture.

In light of these findings, FL students and would-be translators have to be made aware of such differences so that they can produce foreign or translated texts whose cognitive structures are similar to those texts written originally in the target language