The popular view, that the meaning of a sign is its translation by another sign, is obviously mistaken. Meanings are what signs possess, it is not what signs are. The point of Peirce’s so-called translation theory of meaning is, rather, that there are no meanings apart from signs. Even so, in his mature semeiotic, he identified meanings with interpretants not themselves significant. This avoids such absurdities as that of Eco’s ‘unlimited semeiosis’. And Peirce’s divisions of interpretants enables us to account for the distinctions we make among varieties of poor translation, mistranslation, the untranslatable, and so on.