In this article we try to find an answer concerning the existence or non-existence of a difference between translation and self-translation, two practices that can be easily perceived as identical ones. To distinguish the differences between them, we fully support the hypothesis launched by Irina Mavrodin that self-translation, in comparison with translation, is out of simulacrum, being a creation in the full sense of the term. This hypothesis reinforces the idea that the allograph translation as well as the auctorial translation are two different operations and each of them is constraining. The ideal of creation is achieved by personalities endowed with an exceptional synergistic and scriptural bilingualism, by the experiences of self-translation, the phenomenon in the framework of which we can certainty speak about an equiprimordiality between the primary text and the self-translated text. By confronting different opinions of theoreticians and especially of practitioners, we conclude that self-translation is an interlingual and intercultural translation, a sui generis act of literary creation born from/in the spirit of a duplicated writer, that the relationship between the initial text and the self-translated text represents the result of a creative rewriting of a non-simulacrum author who decides to translate his work and adapt it to a new target reader, exponent of a new linguaculture.