| Study on metaphor could be traced back to Aristotle in Ancient Greek and witnessed multischools with different viewpoints until today. Since George Lakoff and Johnson Mark published their masterpiece Metaphors We Live By in 1980s, study on metaphor has initialed an anew angle from the cognitive perspective. More and more Chinese scholars also began their studies in this field. Hu Zhuanglin contributed to the part of grammatical metaphor. Shu Dingfang developed the metaphorical study, by publishing his famous work Metaphorical Study. A detailed study on one subpart of metaphor also appeared in China, i.e. A Cognitive Approach to Spatial Metaphors in English and Chinese by Lan Chun. Some of the present contrastive studies of animal metaphors between English and Chinese are from the cultural perspective and some from the cognitive perspective. Based upon the former metaphorical theories, this paper mainly focuses on the contrastive study of animal metaphors between English and Chinese from the cultural perspective. By analyzing their linguistic structures, reflected values and animal images, this paper further explores the cultural connotative factors of animal metaphors such as living conditions, religious beliefs, literary factor, historical process and customary cultures. In foreign language learning, animal metaphors closely linked with cultural connotations are difficult to understand, which often causes hindrance in the cross-cultural communication and translation. Based on the analysis of differences and similarities of Chinese and English animal metaphors, this paper tentatively puts forth some translating strategies between English and Chinese animal metaphors including image keeping, image borrowing, image increasing, image omitting and literal translation with note. Aiming at different animal metaphors with different features, different strategies might be adopted so as to keep cross-cultural communication and translation smoothly.
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