This chapter reviews the key sociolinguistic and pragmatics principles that underpin discourse analysis, and examines Chinese discourse and pragmatics in terms of language universality and specificity. It advocates the importance of a discourse perspective for examining Chinese translation at both the micro (linguistic) and macro (sociocultural) levels, placing emphasis on examples drawn from Chinese translation studies. It presents both mainstream and novel discourse-analytical frameworks and concludes with a case study to illustrate the use of some important methods in context.