The proliferation of international advertising campaigns has brought the translator to the forefront and opened the way for the marked expansion of what can conveniently be styled “advertising translation”. This is increasingly emerging as a key factor in the business world’s internationalization strategies. The present article gives a survey of the factors — both exogenous and endogenous — which exert an influence in this type of translation, and provides a detailed study of the object and the method used to optimize interlinguistic transference. The specificity of the advertising text is manifest both from the communication standpoint and from the strictly semiotic angle and calls for distinctive treatment. Hence the translator of advertising material cannot afford any skimping in a linguistic analysis of the significant structure with which he has to deal. For it is the perceptiveness of his analysis that will determine the quality of the translation and the success of the advertising campaign.