A metaphor is one of the most difficult linguistic phenomena for translation.The context contributes largely in making the process of metaphor translation much easier. The paper identifies and analyzes functions of the context that minimize the difficulties in translating English metaphors into the Russian language. The forms of the language implementation of the metaphor are diverse, which allows the author in each case to choose his own version, corresponding to the contextual and pragmatic tasks of a particular message. The analysis showed that the most frequently used in the translation of metaphor is the context function, which consists in the resolution of polysemy, one of the most complex translation problems.