In this article the author sets out to disentangle the thorny concepts ‘convention’, ‘culture’ and 'text type’, basing himself on disciplines as widely varied as language philosophy, pragmatics, translation studies or discourse analysis. He always illustrates his explanations of these notions by giving examples of differences between German and English contexts. He then discusses macrostructures and microstructures of text types, and tries to pin down the differences found between German and English texts. He rounds off his article by considering the consequences for translation. Should the translator preserve the source-text structure and thus create a kind of alienation effect or should he conform to the target-text-type conventions and thus create a text which looks perfectly normal?