Similarities and differences across languages can be observed in terms of the use of body part terms (BPTs) to express states, actions, emotions, and thoughts. This study primarily compared five best-selling English books with their Turkish translations and identified in both sets of books (a) the distribution of the literal and non-literal uses of BPTs, (b) the similarities and differences between the BPT-containing metaphorical linguistic expressions (MLEs), and (c) the similarities and differences between the conceptual metaphors (CMs) underlying the BPT-containing MLEs. Secondly, in relation to the content analysis of the corpus, Turkish speakers' understandings of a dead metaphor were studied. The results reveal that although there are overlapping uses of BPTs in the MLEs in both sets of books and there are similar CMs underlying the BPT-containing MLEs, Turkish translations include more non-literal uses of BPTs than the original English versions. Shifts in BPTs when translated into Turkish are also observed. As for the dead metaphor various scenarios concerning the etymological origin of the dead metaphor were expressed by the Turkish participants. The differences identified in the translation corpus indicate that English BPT-containing MLEs and CMs underlying them should be among the criteria in the selection and design of the materials to teach English lexicon, and that a crosslinguistic perspective would be useful while teaching the English MLEs to the learners of English as a foreign language.