The author reviews the influential text type and skopos theory of Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer and the work of the German functionalists (notably Christiane Nord and Juliane House). Textual practices are as varied as the contexts they serve, subsuming a wide range of structures beyond the single sentence. In Translation Studies, the challenge for years has been to identify these macro-structures and to define their precise role in the process of translation and interpreting. This specifically means that a difference needs to be made between such contextual templates as the 'register' membership of texts on the one hand, and, on the other, the variety of rhetorical purposes served by 'texts'; the range of conventional 'genres' systematically utilized; and the various attitudes conveyed in and through 'discourse'. This chapter examines the various communicative resources specifically from the vantage point of the translator and in terms of how the effectiveness of activities such as reading and writing (which are crucial to any act of translating) can only be enhanced by a context-sensitive approach to texts.