Nowadays the nature of the technical text has been changing, as the text is developing to meet the needs of the present time and globalized science, and, respectively, the nature of terms has been changing to account for the dynamics of the change of the text. The changes in the structure of the technical text may be considered as a reason for the development of the conflicting tendencies characteristic of the contemporary technical vocabulary. The main conflict is caused by the process of formalization of technical vocabulary initiated by compilation of technical text corpora and development of multi-lingual terminological data bases on the one hand, and the on-going process of metaphorization and extension of meaning of the existing and newly created terms on the other. The present article mainly aims at the analysis of the tendency for metaphorization of technical vocabulary. The complicated mechanisms underlying the processes of meaning formation, extension and compression are illustrated in the article considering terms from the field of Civil Engineering and their translation into Latvian.