This study is based on a bilingual corpus made up of advertisements published in North American magazines and their translations for French Canadians, and on a unilingual corpus of advertisements published in France. Drawing primarily on research conducted in the area of cultural studies and on such concepts as universalism/particularism, individualism/collectivism, monochronic/synchronic cultures, etc., this paper analyses the part played by feelings and language, and the referential preferences in the North American advertisements, their translated versions and the French advertisements.