Reiss sees translation as an act of

Reiss sees translation as an act of communication whereby the translator acts as a medium. This presuppose that a message has to be passed across, from the source text to the target text. The major media are the source language and the target language. The aim here is to produce a target language text “that is functionally equivalent” to the source language text. This means the source text should be the consultative point for the translator. In order to achieve this functional equivalence, Reiss proposes a functional approach of text-typology. This approach takes into account the communicative functions of a source text as a basis for translating into the target text.