Beware of metaphors.

I always say in German "Metaphern sind Glücksache" but that doesn't translate into English.

If you want to say something in a foreign language, stay clear of metaphors, unless you are absolutely certain that they exist in that language, and that they mean what you want to say. 

My favorite example for this is a very impolite thing to say, but it serves well to illustrate the point I am trying to make. When you say in English that a person “eats like a pig” you imply the person’s food intake is inappropriately large, but when you say it in German, you refer to the eater’s table manners. 

So here we have a metaphor using the image of a familiar animal which looks exactly the same in two languages, but it means two very different things in these two languages. The two languages even belong to the same family of cultures – how much more dangerous it must be therefore, to use metaphors when talking to people from different cultures, even if you use your own language. 

Arguably Northern Europe and North America have a lot in common, but still Europeans will not understand American metaphors derived from baseball such as “hitting a home run”, and likewise Americans might not understand right away what it means when you show a “yellow card” to someone, even though soccer has made some inroads there over the last few decades. 

Like stupid Anglicisms in the German language, this is one of my favorote linguistic topics, so watch this space.