There are three major points of contact between Translation Studies and metaphor theory: the use of specific metaphors to describe the functioning of translation, the use of translation as a metaphor for exchange and transformation within different forms of discourse, and the question of the translatability of metaphors and the development of translational strategies necessary to achieve this. There is, however, a fourth possibility that has not encountered yet all the attention it deserves: metaphor and translation share a series of structural similarities and their history within the Western tradition has been interlinked from the very beginning. Traces of this shared but not always explicitly acknowledged history can be detected in the common etymology of the two notions in Greek, Latin and English. Throughout history, furthermore, shifts in the appraisal of metaphor have very often found their echo in corresponding reappraisals within Translation Studies. Instead of studying the different metaphors used to describe translational processes and the theoretical points of view they imply, this paper therefore focuses on the different theoretical approaches developed with regard to the functioning of metaphor in an attempt to investigate the workings of translation and some of the stages Translation Studies has gone through. To put it in other words, the paper focuses on the meta-communicative potential of metaphor as a metaphor for translation.