The rationale underlying this paper is that though universality is a feature of metaphor, ready acceptance of alien metaphors should never be taken for granted. After an overview of how Chinese and English metaphors differ, the author goes on to discuss how Chinese metaphors are adequately translated into English and vice versa by comparing different versions of the same original. Instead of trying to prescribe how a source language metaphor should be translated, the author adopts an essentially descriptive approach by taking examples from the different versions of two classical novels (A Dream of the Red Chamber for Chinese and Vanity Fair for English) and draws attention to how source language metaphors have been translated, so that one may find out how best metaphors are handled in translation.