The invention relates to method and apparatus for generating modulation symbols according to a second symbol mapping scheme by a symbol mapping unit being adapted to generate symbols according to a first symbol mapping scheme, wherein the first and second symbol mapping schemes define different mappings of data words of a stream to modulation symbols of a modulation scheme according to the respective symbol mapping scheme. Further, the invention relates to a method and apparatus for generating a mapping of data words to modulation symbols of a square 16 QAM constellation, the modulation symbols being representable by an inphase component and quadrature component. One aspect of the invention is the introduction of a bit sequence transformer unit transforming the data words to be mapped to modulation symbols prior to mapping thereby changing the Hamming distance properties of the mapping. Another aspect of the invention is the generation of a new AICO (Antipodal Inverted COnstellation) mapping scheme.