Abstract
 
It is difficult for most people to make sense of the daily operation and development of business strike us as complicated and abstract. To improve the situation，conceptual metaphors often serve as a vehicle to express the abstract notions in the economic field. Through a contrastive analysis of a large number of examples from English and Chinese economic articles, several types of conceptual metaphors are extracted. The application of these metaphors not only represents the universality in the metaphorical cognition among all nations, but also demonstrates the cultural differences in the operation of metaphorical concepts.

Key words: conceptual metaphor, cognition, similarity, difference, cross-culture

摘 要
 
经济的运行及其发展对大多数人来说是复杂和抽象的，经济领域中的抽象概念往往通过概念隐喻得到具体呈现。本文通过对英汉商务文本大量实例的对比分析，总结出常见的商务文体中的概念隐喻。英汉商务文本的对比研究一方面说明了隐喻认知的普遍性和各民族间认知的相似性，另一方面也说明了隐喻概念的运作过程中也存在着文化的差异。

关键词：概念隐喻; 认知; 相似性; 差异性; 跨文化

1. Introduction
       Since the 1970s, the study of metaphor has not only become something of a concern for linguists, but also aroused great interests of philosophers, psychologists, sociologists etc. Among the numerous achievements in metaphor research, the Conceptual Metaphor Theory put forward by George Lakoff attracted the most attention. The theory claims that metaphor is the basis of human cognition, thought, experience, speech and behavior. It is a basic means by which we live. The nature of metaphor is to understand and experience one kind of subject matter through another kind.
   The importance of economy in our daily life highlights the necessity of studying economic articles with the aim of better absorbing the information related to economy in both Chinese and English. Because of the relative abstractness of things related to economy, it must be understood via metaphors. Resting on George Lakoff’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the article tries to analyze the metaphorical expressions of business in both Chinese and English and collects many English and Chinese metaphorical business expressions and then categorizes them into nine types of conceptual metaphors: BUSINESS IS LIVING ORGANISM, MOVEMENT, VEHICLE, FLUID, WAR, GAME, BUILDING, JOURNEY and CONTAINER.