This chapter attempts to do three things: first, to briefly discuss the roles that cultural studies and linguistic approaches to translation play in Translation Studies. The author argues that one way of bridging the widening rift between the two camps is to make use of functional approaches to analyzing text and discourse. Functional approaches offer themselves as mediating tools because they take account of the context of linguistic units, which means that they necessarily consider the embeddedness of linguistic units in cultural contexts and can thus serve as a useful instrument for looking at translation as intercultural communication. Secondly, the author gives an example of such a functional-contextual approach to translation which includes the operation of two distinct types of translation. This approach is exemplified in the third part of the paper. Fourthly and finally, the author briefly discusses a recent phenomenon which may endanger the nature of translation as intercultural communication and reduce it to an instrument for linguistic-cultural colonization.