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Introduction Domesticating translation" and "foreign zing translation" are the terms coined by L. Venetia (1995) to describe the two different translation strategies. The former refers to the translation strategy in which a transparent, fluent style is adopted in order to minimize the strangeness of the foreign text for target language readers, while the latter designates the type of translation in which a target text "deliberately breaks target conventions by retaining something of the foreignness of the original" (Shuttle worth &Cowries, 1997:59)The roots of the terms can be traced back to the German Philosopher Schneider marcher’s argument that there are only two different methods of translation, " either the translator leaves the author in peace, as much as possible, and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and move the author towards him"(Venetia, 1995: 19-20). The terms "foreign inaction" and "domestication" may be new to the Chinese, but the concepts they carry have been at least for a century at the heart of most translation controversies. Lu Xun once said that "before translating, the translator has to make a decision: either to adapt the original text or to retain as much as possible the foreign flavors of the original text" (Xu, in Luo, 1984: 315). But what is the translation practice like in China? Recently I have read two articles which show completely conflicting views on this question. In his article entitled "Chinese and Western Thinking On Translation", A. Levelers makes a generalization based on his comparison of Chinese and Western thinking on translation, When Chinese translates texts produced by Others outside its boundaries, it translates these texts in order to replace them, pure and simple. The translations take the place of the original. They function as the original in the culture to the extent that the original disappear behind the translations. (Bassett & Levelers, 1998:14) However, Fung and Kiu have drawn quite different conclusions from their investigation of metaphor translation between English and English metaphor the image often than not retained, whereas with the Chinese metaphors, substitution is frequently used. [...] One reason perhaps is that the Chinese audience is more familiar with and receptive to Western culture than the average English readers is to Chinese culture. (Fung, 1995) The above conflicting views aroused my interest in finding out whether the Chinesetend to domesticate or to foreignism when they translate a foreign text. In what follows I shall not compare translation by Western and Chinese translators, but rather look into thetranslation of English metaphors into Chinese. 1. What is Metaphor? The Random House Unabridged Dictionary (second addition) define s metaphor as "a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance." While according to BBC English Dictionary, "metaphor is a way of describing something by saying that it is something else which has the qualities that you are trying to describe." Peter New mark defines metaphor as "any figurative expression: the transferred sense of a physical word; the personification of an abstraction; the application of a word orcollocation to what it does not literally denote, i.e., to describe one thing in terms of another. [...] Metaphors may be 'single' -- viz. one-word --