Due to the increasing importance of concepts such as alienness and foreignness and the rise of xenological and phenomenological studies in the field of philology, a translational approach has become necessary. From a translation studies perspective, translators are exposed to alienness in every source text. The translator's focus is on the transfer of those foreign phenomena to the target text. In this context, it makes sense to benefit from both xenology and phenomenology, since the main purpose of xenology is to reveal the alienness problem; phenomenology, on the other hand, makes the alien phenomenon visible. Waldenfels' approach to the phenomenology of alienness is based on alien experience and alien understanding, thereby establishing the degrees of alienness. When Waldenfels' approach is applied in translation studies, it offers translators a way to recognize foreign phenomena more easily in the source text and classify them according to their degree. Therefore, this study couples Katharina Reiss' text type model with Bernhard Waldenfels' work on degrees of alienness and provides a new perspective on Reiss' approach. In this context, Waldenfels' approach, when applied to the field of translation, can help to differentiate foreign phenomena according to their degree. Together with Reiss's text typology, translators can use the determination of their text type to identify what kind of alienness they may be dealing with and to review their translation decisions. Since every determination makes alienness visible in a sense, it can be said that this visibility can also be effective in the translation process, because depending on the text type and the translator's scope, the visibility of the alien in the target text can vary.