Based on the findings of a research on implicit references used in general-language texts, the authors are looking at a corpus made of advertisements in order to ascertain that the use of implicit references in specialized texts varies according to languages pairs, in this case French and English. Their findings lead them to conclude that the results seem to confirm the peculiarity of advertising texts as a genre. In addition, their findings may be used to better understand what translation competence really entails, especially with respect to world-knowledge, which is crucial not only to fully understand texts to be translated, but also to re-express the meaning of these texts both accurately and idiomatically.