Emotional metaphors abound in the original works and translations of A Dream of Red Mansions. Based on statistical analysis, a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods are utilized from the perspective of cognitive linguistics to study the emotional metaphors appearing in the first 50 chapters of the novel and their corresponding English translations by Hawkes and the Yang couple. To generalize rules in the translation of emotional metaphors, the emotional metaphor of “Qi” is taken as an example by calculating the ratios of each kind of emotional metaphors and the frequencies of translation methods adopted. The findings suggest that when translating emotional metaphors, translators have selected their strategies from cognitive perspectives to achieve equivalence between the source language and the target language despite some challenges and restrictions. It is thus concluded that the emotional metaphor in the novel cannot be translated directly but can be approached through the selection of appropriate translation methods including meaning transfer, meaning deviation, and metaphor omission.