This dissertation has three goals: to establish an inventory of translation strategies applicable to the translation of metaphor, to investigate how the application of these strategies affects the balance in metaphorical quality between source text and target text, and, finally, to determine whether this balance is a useful indicator of the direction of the translation as a whole, towards either adequacy or acceptability. To carry out this research the author has established a corpus comprising 250 metaphors from the novel La goutte d'or by Michel Tournier and its Swedish translation, Gulddroppen by C. G. Bjurström. The underlying theory and methodology of the study are those of Gideon Toury as outlined in his book Descriptive Translation Studies and beyond. The study is thus essentially descriptive in nature.