This paper aims to study the applications of Metaphorical Pattern Analysis (MPA) to contrastive analysis and translation by researching the differences in the metaphorical mappings instantiated by the English words 'crisis' and 'recession' and their translation equivalents in Spanish crisis and recesión. Since no translation or comparable corpora for this type of study are available for English and Spanish, the search engine Webcorp is used to research the occurrences of these terms in news texts via the web sites of a number of different English and Spanish newspapers. Our data reveal language-specific differences in the way in which both the synonyms and their respective translation equivalents participate in the metaphorical mappings found in each language.