While research on texts as units larger than sentences has a rich tradition in translation studies, the notion of context, its relation to text, and the role it plays in translation has received much less attention. In this paper, the author makes an attempt at rethinking the relationship between context and text for translation. The author first reviews several conceptions of context and the relationship between text and context in a number of different disciplines. Secondly, she presents a theory of translation which is to be understood as a theory of re-contextualization that explicates the relationship between context and text in its design and categorial scheme. Finally, the author sketches a recent development in translation and multilingual text production, which may limit the scope of re-contextualization in translation.