From the perspective of CMT,this paper analyzes the "water" image in ancient Chinese love poems and points out that it is essentially a conceptual metaphor mapped from the source domain "water" to the target domain "love".The purpose of the study herein lies in negating the idea that the translation of metaphor is simply the transfer of literal signs and to propose that translators should try to achieve the mapping equivalence between original "water" image and target "water" image in translating the "water" image into English.The translation strategies include translating,changing and manifesting the source domain.