This empiric-experimental study investigates the cognitive effort in the problem solving process guiding decision making in the translation of linguistic metaphors in a journalistic text by twelve professional translators from Chinese into Portuguese. The Metaphor Identification Procedure (Pragglejaz 2007, Steen et al. 2010) was used in order to discern linguistic metaphors and literal expressions of the source text. The tools for the collection of the data were retrospective verbal protocols, and the Translog II program (Carl 2012a), which logs keystrokes, mouse, and eye movements connected to a Tobii T120 eye tracker. Additionally, questionnaires were applied. For the quantitative analysis, a linear mixed effects regression model (LMER) was applied to the data set to indirectly measure cognitive effort for linguistic metaphor translation. The dependent variable was total production time. The controversial predictors were type of expression (metaphorical or literal), and translation strategy. For the qualitative analysis, retrospective protocols were analyzed for subjects’ verbalization of problem solving decisions regarding the linguistic metaphor under study. For the analysis and discussion, I triangulated the quantitative and qualitative data (Alves 2003), whereby parameters are proposed in order to enable the measurement of the problem solving process for the translation of linguistic metaphors. The outcomes of this study demonstrate that in the analysis 1, no effect expression type on total production time. In the analysis 1.1 the predictor translation strategy has significance (p<0.05) for the production time, which was confirmed by the retrospective protocol. This study is intended to contribute to the methodology Chinese Portuguese Translation Process Research, as well as to a deeper understanding of the complexity of cognitive processes underlying the translation of metaphors from Chinese into Portuguese, which is anticipated to contribute significantly to the teaching of metaphor translation. KEY WORDS: linguistic metaphors, Chinese and Portuguese translation, Translation Process Research, Cognitive effort, translation strategy.