Cognitive view of metaphor can be of great use for translation studies inasmuch as it provides new convincing explanations for a wide range of metaphor translations found in political discourse, e.g. accounting for replacement or omission of the original image in the target text in terms of cognitive conflict. This paper interprets the process of rendering metaphors in a translation as a complex cognitive activity which is determined by both structures of source and target languages and a strategy of foreignization or domestication (semi-)deliberately chosen by translator. It is supposed that a set of various kinds of metaphor translations constitutes a continuous scale within the poles of domestication and foreignization and a large number of intermediate cases. The body of evidence used in the article for establishing the continuum is taken from the parallel Finnish-Russian corpus of newspaper texts.