Katharina Reiss

Katharina Reiss (17 April 1923 – 16 April 2018) was a German linguist and translation scholar.

Her works are important in the field of translation studies. She is widely seen as a co-founder of the Skopos theory.

Life Katharina Reiss was born in Rheinhausen, a small town on the left bank of the Rhine, and across the river from Duisburg into which, for administrative purposes, it has subsequently been subsumed. She passed her school finals exam ("Abitur" - loosely translated in English language sources as "diploma") in 1940 and went on to study between 1941 and 1944 at the Institute of Simultaneous Translation ("Dolmetscher-Institut") of Heidelberg University, where she received her first degree as a "professional translator". She taught at the institute's Spanish department between 1944 and 1970. She combined her teaching work, between 1951 and 1954, with the study of Philology, receiving her doctorate in 1954 for a piece of work on the Spanish author-journalist Leopoldo Alas (also known as "Clarin"). Her former student Christiane Nord contributed an appreciation in which she described Reiss as "a strict but fair teacher with a very subtle sense of humour". She is widely identified as the co-founder, with Hans Vermeer, of the so-called Skopos theory of translation.

In order to establish a standard terminological structure for Translation Sciences, in her habilitation dissertation she proposed classifying each text for translation ("The Operative Text") into one of four text types. Extrapolating from Karl Bühler's Organon model, the texts should be differentiated according to their respective functions, which she defines as "informative", "expressive" or "operative". She proposes a fourth type: "audio-medial", which covers texts that communicate using not just language, but also some other communications method such as acoustic or graphic or other technical.

Output (selection) Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik: Kategorien und Kriteren für eine sachgerechte Beurteilung von Übersetzungen. Munich, Hueber, 1971. Translated into English by Erroll. F. Rhodes as Translation Criticism: The Potentials and Limitations. Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment. St. Jerome Publishing Ltd, 2000. (with Hans Vermeer) Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1984.