Metaphors play a crucial role in rendering abstract and complex economic phenomena more concrete and comprehensible. However, corpus-based comparative studies of economic conceptual metaphors between English and Chinese remain limited. This study addresses this gap by analyzing data from the English-Chinese Parallel Corpus of Financial and Economic Texts (ECPCFE) and applies the Metaphor Pattern Analysis (MPA) framework proposed by Stefanowitsch and Gries. High-frequency lexical items related to the domain of “economy” were extracted, and co-occurring metaphorical expressions were identified and categorized into six conceptual domains: biological, physical, military, natural, spatial, and intra-economic. In addition to conventional domains, the study investigates newly emerging metaphors in the digital economy, highlighting their distinctive features and shifts in metaphor use in contemporary financial discourse. Drawing on a cultural-cognitive perspective, the analysis explains the predominance of certain domains in English economic discourse. To examine translation preferences, a questionnaire was administered to 339 Chinese participants, eliciting their responses to various translation strategies and attitudes toward metaphor retention. Results indicate a moderate tendency (34%) to retain English metaphors in Chinese translations, suggesting a partial acceptance of Western rhetorical styles. Multivariate analysis further reveals that translation choices are significantly influenced by factors such as gender, education, English proficiency, and metaphor type. The study concludes by discussing the pragmatic implications of metaphorical divergences between English and Chinese economic discourse, particularly in cross-cultural communication.