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Abstract
This study examined the English rendering of metaphorical expressions in Iranian political news discourse through an integrated framework of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Relevance Theory (RT). Drawing on a corpus of 43 Persian political news items from Iranian news agencies (Fars, Tabnak, Mehr) and their English translations published by American media outlets (Washington Post, Fox News), the research employed Lakoff and Johnson's (1980) foundational CMT model alongside Kövecses' (2010, 2017) extended framework to identify conceptual metaphors. Subsequently, Gutt's (2000, 2014) relevance-theoretic approach was applied to analyze translation strategies—specifically direct versus indirect translation—and assess translators' success in achieving optimal relevance across culturally and politically divergent contexts. Results revealed a predominant preference for direct translation strategies (88.37%, n = 38), with only 11.63% (n = 5) employing indirect approaches. This pattern suggests translators prioritized preserving source-text metaphorical structures despite significant ideological and cultural asymmetries between Iranian and Western political discourses. The findings contribute to contemporary debates on cross-cultural metaphor comprehension (Musolff, 2021; Zou et al., 2025), embodied cognition in political rhetoric (Lakoff, 2012; Jamrozik et al., 2016), and the cognitive challenges inherent in translating ideologically charged metaphors across geopolitical divides.