Despite the increase in scholarly articles and publications that focus on singable translations of vocal music texts, few tackle the relationships and interplay between the two main semiotic systems of words and music, nor how they may or may not be preserved in translation. The translator’s understanding of how meaning arises across semiotic resources, especially between music and words, is equally as important a criterion for decision making when translating a vocal music text as sense, naturalness, singability, rhythm and rhyme and deserves as much attention as any staging demands or the diverse requirements of cultural transfer. By means of demonstration, using examples from a translation of Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro by Jeremy Sams, this study explores an approach to singable opera translation that focuses on the stylistic decisions of the composer when marrying verbal and non-verbal semiotic modes and how the translator preserves or alters their relationship, which in turn may affect their interpretation, especially by singers.