Metaphors are a powerful way of capturing a reader’s imagination. Metaphor comes from the Greek meaning, “carry something across” or “transfer”. It is very like a simile but does not use the comparison “like …” or “as... as …”. A simple analogy might be if you were in a dormitory that was fairly bland you might say, “my dorm is a prison”. This would suggest to the reader that you feel as though you were placed in solitary confinement, you are being fed lousy food, you are deprived of all of life's pleasures, your room is poorly lit and cramped, or a hundred other images, that, if you tried to say them all, would probably take several pages and disenfranchise the reader.

A less direct form is by implication. If you wanted to show a character’s annoyance you might say, “John swelled and ruffled his plumage” inferring that he looked like a peacock (which would be a simile) or “They have branches everywhere” which indicates that they are part of a bigger organisation.

Metaphors do appear in other languages e.g. Circles of Censorship: Censorship and Its Metaphors in French History, Literature, and Theory by: Nicholas Harrison but many countries, such as China, express comparison through sayings such as by Confucius, “Rotten wood cannot be carved, nor are dung walls plastered”. Other cultures use similar forms of expression but in countries where English has had a major impact you will find metaphors. After all we do live in a global village.

A metaphor relies on the listener having the same understanding of both the metaphor and the "real-world" object being alluded to as that of the speaker, or the original meaning is lost.

The cleverer the metaphor, of course, the more nuance is involved in the comparison. If, as is commonly thought, the Inuit people have a great number of words to describe the many different kinds of snow which they experience, they would presumably be able to use these metaphorically in many situations to allude to various qualities of such precipitation. But even if you speak the language involved, you can't benefit from the full meaning of the netaphor if you haven't seen the snow!

Wittgenstein said: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world". Therefore, one supposes, any given metaphor which one created would be limited to one's own speech community.

It's not sufficient just to use a dictionary to translate both terms: you must have an understanding of the cultural context of the words you're using too, or you run the risk of (at best) simply not getting your original meaning across, or (worse) producing something which is culturally insulting or unpleasant!