Hierarchical taxonomy is one of the main models of text organisation which is widely applied in computational linguistics and at the same time it is of considerable relevance in translation studies. The study of hierarchical taxonomy helps define subclasses of different words and distinguish subordinate words from their hypernyms. Hypernymy is a relation of class to subclass. Thus a hypernym usually has a number of hyponyms. A hyponym is a word that belongs to and is equally ranked in a generic class. Hyponymy is considered to be one of the key mechanisms organizing the main semantic networks in the text. In the paper different models of representation of hyponymy are discussed and exemplified considering technical terminology as the medium for analysis in translation perspective.