[1][2] 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.
Reiss received her habilitation (higher academic qualification) from the University of Mainz for her research and development work involving so-called "Operative text types" ("zum operativen Texttyp").
[3] Later, during the Winter term of 1994/95 Reiss served as a guest professor at Vienna, presenting a lecture series for translation and simultaneous interpretation training.
[4][5] 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".
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".