Abstract

Texture can be defined as the way a text is put together. This study presents a contrastive analysis of textual devices in Arabic texts and their English translation following the method propounded by Halliday (1994). It aims at investigating the textual devices in English and Arabic to find out the various devices used by the two different language families, it is only natural that texture represented by such devices poses great difficulties for experienced translators, let alone beginners. Thus, the present study tries to find evidence for the hypotheses that English and Arabic show differences in their use of textual devices and that Arabic, unlike English, prefers to group information into large grammatical chunks.
It has been found here that the two languages show marked differences in their use of these devices. It has also been found that the English texts show preference for using a considerable lower number of additives than Arabic. Moreover, Arabic texts incline towards the use of a considerably higher number of lexical items than their English equivalents to achieve texture.
The study falls into three sections, the first section presents the problem, aims of the study and the hypothesis. The second section is concerned with giving a review of literature on standards of textuality. Section three tackles the aspect of texture in English and Arabic