Abstract: Investigations in cognitive linguistics definitely show that metonymy and metaphor are not only figures of speech, but also ways of human thinking.For a long time, the academic circles of translation both at home and abroad have intuitively regarded translation as being metaphoric or metonymic, but there is no evidence from practice.Based on a small corpus, this study makes an attempt to explore the categories and manners of semantic shifts in E-C academic translation.It is found that the semantic shifts in E-C academic translation are fundamentally metonymic, and that translators tend to consciously or subconsciously adopt the metonymic mode of thinking in the process of translation, which partly verifies the concept of translation as metonymy, and partly falsifies the hypothesis of translation as metaphor.