The translation of advertising was almost completely overlooked by Translation Studies for many years. This paper examines how far the evolution of translation theory has managed (or failed) to cope with the special circumstances of advertising translation. It considers some of the principal linguistic characteristics of advertising, and how these give insights into long-debated issues of translation theory such as translatability, the unit of translation and standardization. Audience, function, purpose and cross-cultural transfer are particular areas studied, and the treatment of advertising in some major works in Translation Studies is discussed. Finally, it is suggested that concepts from writing on visual and multimodal communication need to be incorporated into the study not only of advertising translation but of all types of translation.