Because metonymy refers sometimes to country-specific places known to the inhabitants of that country and awareness of these references may not be shared by those belonging to other countries, its .treatment in translation acquires special importance as it may require intervention between the ST and TT by the translator and may also require his specific knowledge of a TL culture.

Given this, the purpose of this paper is to define the concept of metonymy, argue whether it makes a complete speech act or not and suggest a translation strategy to handle it through arguing relevant examples from English and Arabic with refer­ence to a speech act mechanism