Within multinational enterprises, corporate values are instruments of a normative global corporate culture and are transferred from the parent company to the subsidiaries to create a common cultural framework. However, the meaning of corporate values is largely specific to the source language and the context in which they were formulated. Our paper presents a case study illustrating the process of value decoding and interpretation at the French and German subsidiaries of an American multinational enterprise. This binational comparative analysis allows us to highlight differences in the interpretation of values at subsidiary level and illustrates how corporate values are “recontextualised” locally.