This document discusses design as a process of translation. It argues that designers act as translators and interpreters of unstructured social needs, contextualizing and adapting them into artifacts. Design involves mediating between source contents and end users. The process requires textualizing unstructured entities and interpreting them to construct artifacts that translate and answer the original questions or signs. Design is proposed as a form of translation that establishes meaning through aesthetic, interpretive, affective and performative dimensions.