Discourse analysis, as an approach to text, provides the teacher, student, and professional translator with resources for achieving objectivity and for making and justifying translation decisions. It offers a strategy for relating the problems and processes and discourse and the specific concerns to the objectives of the translator. It can be applied in translating all kinds of texts, scientific, legal, religious, or other. The elements addressed in discourse analysis include various text types, texture of the text, text coherence and cohesion, context and co-text, dimension (communicative, pragmatic, or semiotic), discourse (language in use) as distinguished from text (structured language sequence), genre, and register. There are two fundamental advances in translation theory attributable to discourse analysis: that (1) the relevant language unit for translating is the entire text, not the single word or sentence; and (2) dimension and co-text are indispensable for interpreting and processing source and target texts. Discourse analysis has moved away from former approaches that perceived translation as applying grammatical rules and referring to a dictionary, revealing the limitations of a bilingual dictionary as a translation tool and successfully dealing with the complex relationships between meaning, culture, and language. (MSE)