The paper explores the different approaches to metaphor understanding and metaphor translation within the fields linguistics and cognitive linguistics. Semantics scholars view metaphors as the application of an alien name by transfer either from genus to species, or from species to species, or by analogy(Aristotle), while pragmatics scholars view metaphor as being dependent on context. Scholars of the cognitive linguistics school (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Lakoff, 1987) portray metaphor as a system used to comprehend one conceptual domain in terms of another conceptual domain via sets of correspondences between these two domains. This paper focuses on the main approaches to metaphors understanding, and approaches to metaphor transfer and translation, as metaphor translation represents a burden for translators no matter the language. This is due to the fact that translation involves multiple processes that include both linguistic and non-linguistic elements. Based on linguistics and cognitive linguistics theories, a number approaches and procedures such as prescriptive approach, the descriptive approach and the cognitive approach have been developed by scholars for the translation of metaphorical expressions.

metaphor; translation; metaphor translation; cognitive linguistics; Conceptual Metaphor Theory.