Corpus analysis has not yet been greatly exploited in the field of translation studies and, more generally, corpus-based studies of discursive imagery are rare. No comparative study of the structure of similes, metaphors and analogies in French and English has been done to date. It therefore seems relevant, from a translational perspective, to undertake such a corpus-based study with a bilingual corpus of spontaneous language texts and not translations, an analysis method which allows the establishing of optimally objective models based on actual usage in both languages.This research aims to highlight the lexical, syntactic and referential characteristics of images used in popularized scientific texts in French and English, in order to identify possible differences or similarities in the creative use of discursive imagery in both languages, with a view to eventually proposing certain orientations for idiomatic translation of imagery in such texts.The study is based upon the analysis of 2,000 images (1,000 in each language) from 6 scientific popularization magazines (3 for each language). Stock-phrases, idiomatic expressions and lexical images are excluded from this analysis as far as translators can find equivalents in dictionaries, glossaries and terminological data banks. Our corpus is thus exclusively composed of original mainly explicatory images for which translators must make active choices in order to rebuild the logical frame of the modelled concepts while respecting the idiomaticity of the target sociolect.This dissertation is divided in five chapters. Chapter I formulates the theoretical bases ; Chapter II explains corpus choice criteria and the findings with reference toimage types ; Chapter III analyzes image referents ; Chapter IV addresses image structures ; Chapter V deals with image translation, adding translation solutions derived from our findings to those prescribed by various authors.