Bearing in mind the problems of translation in a semiotic perspective, we are going to analyse the notion of “authorial translation” as a kind of semiotranslation. In this particular case, “authorial translation” will be understood as an “individualized” translation of texts, in which the emotional and stylistic (and often even informative and conceptual) color of the target text is provided by the translator himself, sometimes without any consideration of the author’s intentions. Therefore, the alterations and modifications of the original text don’t occur “spontaneously”, but rather according to the will of the translator himself, who becomes, in a sense, equal to the author. Moreover, in this particular case the translator conceives his major task not in translation as such, but in the creation of a new text which will not be necessarily presented as a translation. The paper will focus on the authorial translation of poetic texts, in which the poetic function (in Roman Jakobson’s terms) dominates. From a methodological point of view, particular attention will be paid to questions of 1) the creation of new semiotic units on the textual level, during the process of the authorial translation, 2) the (ir)reversibility of sign activity in this particular case, 3) the most adequate models of sign and semiosis allowing for this process to be described. We will demonstrate that the necessity of a semiotic description of this kind of translation can be explained by the fact that, although in this case we distinguish the authorial translation as a particular type of translation activity, in a way any translation can be considered authorial, as it is dependent on the knowledge, skills, experience and, especially, intentions of the translating person. The basic theses of our paper will be illustrated by examples of poetic texts translated from German (Heinrich Heine), French (Paul Verlaine) and Estonian (Jaan Kaplinski) into Russian.