In traditional approaches, newspaper and advertising texts were customarily quoted as typical examples of 'free translation', or 'unfaithfulness'. Although it is true that these texts present certain translation peculiarities, this is by no means a random process of transfer. Quite on the contrary, it is argued here that it is precisely these texts that demonstrate how systematically translators are capable of forecasting the average target recipient and of adapting the texts to reader expectations by fulfilling pragmatic and semiotic considerations in the process of transfer; these seem to be the two guiding parameters for the occurrence of 'translation incidences' in newspaper binomials. To prove this claim, the author presents the results obtained from a descriptive study carried out with a selection of semiotic and pragmatic factors on a corpus of newspaper texts published by 'The Guardian' and their subsequent translations into Spanish, published by 'El Mundo'.