The poststructuralist announcement of the death of the author has dispensed with the writer/translator dichotomy. The present paper focuses on Roland Barthes s theories on text and textuality. As the very textuality of signifiers, literary text is the site of signifiance, according the reader authorial power. The paper applies Barthes s theories to translation studies in an attempt to reappraise the role of the translator. The paper argues that a translator performs three roles in signifiance; not only is a translator a reader and writer but also an interlingual transcodifier. Simultaneously, this triad task pinpoints the limitations of some of Barthes s notions, specifically the inefficiency of his distinction between readerly and writerly texts. Deploying Barthes s view on the processual nature of reading/writing, the paper suggests a constant reassessment of the already translated texts. This revisitation is argued to be needful for keeping pace with the steadily and rapidly globalizing world today.

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