The aims of this article are: 1) to define what is to be understood by a text both at a linguistic and at a translation level: to do so, this notion will be tested against several bordering concepts, such as genre, register, or text type, among others; 2) Once text is defined, a thorough analysis of the parameters required to fulfil that definition will be undertaken; 3) Eventually, the implications of the previous analysis will be taken into consideration from a translation-oriented point of view; by doing so, linguistic and cultural transfer of texts as full entities loaded with a grammatical, semantic and pragmatic functional value will be attained.