  We study the solitons of the symmetric space sine-Gordon theories that arise
once the Pohlmeyer reduction has been imposed on a sigma model with the
symmetric space as target. Under this map the solitons arise as giant magnons
that are relevant to string theory in the context of the AdS/CFT
correspondence. In particular, we consider the cases S^n, CP^n and SU(n) in
some detail. We clarify the construction of the charges carried by the solitons
and also address the possible Lagrangian formulations of the symmetric space
sine-Gordon theories. We show that the dressing, or Backlund, transformation
naturally produces solitons directly in both the sigma model and the symmetric
space sine-Gordon equations without the need to explicitly map from one to the
other. In particular, we obtain a new magnon solution in CP^3. We show that the
dressing method does not produce the more general "dyonic" solutions which
involve non-trivial motion of the collective coordinates carried by the
solitons.
