Drawing on corpus-based and process-based approaches, this paper reports on the results of an exploratory study using highly annotated translation corpora in conjunction with key logging, eye tracking, and retrospective verbalizations to identify translation units associated with cognitive effort during a translation task. The annotated corpora are used to analyze the grammatical shifts correlated with the processes of (de)metaphorization that occur during translation. The results of the corpus analysis are then triangulated with process data from an analysis of the performance of two German-English translators while carrying out an inverse translation task. Together the process and product data clearly explicate the nature of the translation units associated with (de)metaphorization during the cognitive processing of the translation.