According to conventional wisdom, linguistic meaning is that which survives the translation of a text from one language to another. Alternatively, translation is meaning-preserving and the success of a given translation is directly proportional to the degree to which it succeeds in keeping intact the meaning of the source text. This has the consequence of treating meaning as language-independent and translation as an activity that, under ideal conditions, has no bearing whatsoever on the meaning of the text. Indeed, so widespread is such a view of meaning and translation that one finds it implicitly or explicitly upheld as the cornerstone of many a theory of language. In this paper, the author examines the consequences of recent theorizing about translation according to which to translate a text is to interfere in its very composition in decisive ways. Translation, according to this alternative theoretical stance, is an inescapably interpretative task and the translator, far from being a mere “carrier” of the meaning of the source text into a new text in the target language, is in fact a person who actively participates in the fabrication of the translated text and, by proxy, of the “original” text as well.