Despite many efforts on both sides over the past decades, the relationship between musicology and Translation Studies has remained complicated for many reasons on the side of both disciplines. One of the possible ways out of this double dead-end road, has proven to be reaching out to the basic concepts of semiotics as a methodological framework. The result is the author's forthcoming book Applying Translation Theories to Musicological Research (Springer 2024).The paper examines how semiotics can help determine what translation means in music. Firstly, the basic semiotic concepts (sign, semiosis and semiosphere) were helpful in formulating the definition and scope of the term translation. Secondly, it is among translation scholars rooted in different schools of semiotics (Peirceian school, Tartu-Moscow school etc.), that the tendency to include sign systems other than language into the typology of translation is particularly visible (e.g., Peeter Torop, Dinda Gorlée, Evangelos Kourdis, Kobus Marais). This fact opens the door for music to play a role in translation theory as a semiotic system from which, in which and into which different texts are translated. Finally, it is semiotics that laid grounds for the contemporary theories of musical signification, starting with the Musical Signification Project launched in Paris in 1984 and Eero Tarasti’s seminal book A Theory of Musical Semiotics published ten years later. These theories, to this day, provide the most reliable tools for deciphering musical meanings, which are essential for music to be understood, interpreted, and possibly also translated into other systems.