ABSTRACT No matter how good a translator thinks his/her own work is, lay readers of the translation often have a rather different opinion. There has been much research on the translations of Macao, mostly from the perspective of translators or researchers. By contrast, the present study investigates readers’ perspective on the translations of slogans and public notices of the Macao government in terms of language quality and effectiveness. With two carefully-designed survey questionnaires, readers' responses are collected for quantitative and qualitative analyses. The texts are analysed in the light of Reiss’ text typology and Newmark's semantic and communicative strategies of translation. The results show that target-text readers are conspicuously less satisfied with the slogans and public notices than the source-text readers are with the original slogans and public notices, and that the match of text types and translation strategies proposed by Newmark does not always guarantee effective and favourable translations. The findings are discussed in relation to text typology, translation strategies, and translation practice in Macao. Keywords: slogan, public notice, lay readers, readers’ perspective, text typology, translation strategies