Although the inclusion of an intralingual category in the three kinds of translation proposed in Roman Jakobson’s well known essay of 1959 seems to have made little more than a demarcatory contribution to the development of translation studies as a discipline it does at least stand as a reminder that that analogous transformational or representational operations of various sorts are central notions in many branches of linguistics. These notions, however, typically have problematical aspects. Accordingly, the aim of this article is to consider two linked proposals: i) practice of and reflexion on translating / interpreting can raise in particularly pointed ways a number of tricky issues for theories of communication in general. ii) consideration of related linguistic paradigms can contribute to a better definition of some characteristic challenges for translation / interpreting studies. In short, T/I raises difficult questions for language and language theory can spotlight problematical concepts in T/I. Accordingly this paper, taking an approach to communication associated with various disciplines grouped around pragmatics and discourse analysis, will consider some pertinent areas of theory (and some textual examples) at the intersection of T/I and other discourse genres. After briefly arguing for the continuing usefulness of discourse studies for T/I, attention will be devoted to some parallel concerns or intriguing conjunctions of discourse-pragmatics theory and T/I. Of particular interest in this respect is the question of discourse variables, the notion of selection among available options and (the other side of this particular coin) the nature and scope of constraints on selection. A further issue is that of underdeterminacy. [Based on abstract in journal]