This paper seeks to offer guidelines for the translation of advertising, by looking at examples of practice and relating these to the communicative aim(s) of advertising messages. The purpose of the study, as reported in this paper, is therefore to compare source and target versions of a corpus of advertising texts, in order to speculate on 1) the nature of the different factors of text production: these include company practice and translation brief, translator profile and place of professional activity; 2) the nature of the overall approach apparently adopted by individual translators in the specific circumstances of text production; 3) the potential for communicative success of each target language text, produced from an original source language text and 4) the potential contribution of the translator in enhancing communicative effectiveness in the advertising message.