Similar Concepts, Different Channels

Abstract The main purpose of this article is to study the way in which the same concept is conveyed in different media involved in the advertising campaign for a given product or service, considering advertisements as semiotic entities and thus translation as an intersemiotic process. Three sets of recent Portuguese campaigns are analyzed, which include television, magazine and radio advertisements. The article demonstrates that some elements can be kept in an almost unchanged form, whereas others have to be altered to achieve similar effect. The ads conveyed by different media strive for an effect of equivalence in their results, making the most of whatever resources the specific languages can offer. Detailed analysis of the advertisements also shows that the meaning of the advertising texts, i.e. the main concept of the campaign, is construed by the viewer in an integrated way, as part of a whole discourse in which the media has a complementary function.