Reiss Text Types and Why They Matter
Katharina Reiss adapted Karl Bühler's organon model to translation. She argued that the dominant communicative function of a text predicts which translation strategy will work.
Three text types
- Informative: content is what matters (news report, technical manual). Strategy: plain prose in the target language, content preserved without ornament.
- Expressive: form is part of meaning (lyric poem, literary novel). Strategy: identify the source's aesthetic devices and find target-language equivalents.
- Operative: the text aims to provoke a response (advertising, polemic). Strategy: adapt freely to provoke the same response in the target reader.
Hybrid texts
Real texts blend types. A research paper is informative in body and operative in abstract. A novel may carry an informative footnote. Reiss's contribution is the question itself: ask what the text is doing before deciding how to translate it.
Further reading: skopos theory, register.