Well, it depends. Some metaphors are more or less universal. Things that are in common across cultures like metaphors relating to physical systems for example.
Yet some other metaphors are very culturally imbued.
If you look at how languages are built – metaphors are a very large part of their structures. It’s not just words+meaning+grammar but conceptual constructions. Thankfully a good portion of language can translate. Some languages are more difficult of course. Chinese for example is full of metaphor. They seem to understand metaphors from other cultures more easily because their language is littered with them. They’re very structural in Chinese. Of course all languages use them as far as I know and, outside of some wacky ones, a short explanation is usually enough to comprehend an uncertain metaphor from one language to another.
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