This article examines the ties between translation studies and opera studies through the lens of Rossini’s opera, Otello. The first part of the paper demonstrates how critics have the tendency to measure the opera’s success based on its correspondence to Shakespeare’s play. Notably, the rhetoric that they use closely resembles certain types of source-text oriented discourse that recur in translation studies, and which have often proved to be problematic. The second part of this paper sets out to demonstrate that this approach to the opera is misleading as it presupposes a direct connection between the opera and play, which does not exist. After all, the librettist of the opera, Francesco Berio di Salsa, had no knowledge of English and was therefore obliged to work with a French adaptation, an Italian adaptation and possibly an Italian translation. The translator and adapters were themselves unfamiliar with English and also had to rely on other translations and adaptations, thereby creating a complex literary web. Although the word “translation” has often been used metaphorically to describe the relationship between Shakespeare’s play and Rossini’s opera, the concrete ways in which translation has intervened have rarely been analyzed. This paper therefore calls for a closer examination of the role of translation in order to elucidate the relationship between an opera and its literary sources, arguing for a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach in order to take into account the specificities of genres and the particular aesthetic context in which each text was elaborated. Ultimately, this paper seeks to illustrate how looking at the role of translation in the creation of opera libretti can at once contribute to the interdisciplinary field of opera and translation, as well as enrich both fields of study.