This essay places popular music and its translation in a socio-semiotic framework and explores the triple emphasis in popular songs on language, music and image. In a first step the polysemiotic text is presented as a social fact. Toury’s polysystemic approach and Jacono’s concept of institutionalisation are used as a theoretical framework in order to explain the different interpretations of a song as a chain of interpretants. In a second step the term “text” is analysed in relation to music, and popular music in particular with the help of three concepts: dialogics, bricolage and mediation. In a last step the intertextual, bricolage-like and mediated character of popular song translation is demonstrated with the analysis of several interpretations of a French chanson and its German translations.