Based on triangulation of eye-tracking, key logging, retrospective protocols and questionnaires, the study aimed to compare post-editing with human translating metaphors from English into Chinese in terms of the cognitive effort of 30 translators and their translation quality. Results showed that for both human translation and post- editing, fixation duration was longer in TT AOI than that in ST AOIs. Besides, the “ accuracy” of metaphor translations was higher than “faithfulness”. Whereas in post-editing, the value of fixation counts, fixation duration in ST AOIs and TT AOIs, pause duration and PWR was all lower than that in human translation, despite the differences between fixation counts, fixation duration in TT AOIs and pause duration were not as significant. What’s more, post- editing produced significantly higher-quality metaphor translations than human translation in terms of “faithfulness” and “accuracy”. It can be reasonably concluded that post-editing not only reduced cognitive effort for English-Chinese metaphor translation but also improved the final quality.