Contemporary professional language is one of the most rapidly developing varieties of language that gives rise to a great number of new lexical units, consequently contributing to the enrichment of the general vocabulary. Many of these lexical items are formed by meaning extension based on metaphorical meaning shift, “reinforcing the claim that metaphor-induced terminologization is a widespread phenomenon that occurs to some extent in all specialized domains” (Ureña 2012: 239). The challenges associated with decoding of the meaning of the terms coined by means of metaphorical meaning extension are most apparent when the message should not only be interpreted by the text recipient in the monolingual environment, but also mediated to and re-encoded in another language, accommodating the realia of other culture setting a clear frame for cognition. Hence, the relations between meaning representation and context are viewed as an interactive process that promotes cognition and communication. The process of cognition and symbolic representation of meaning stimulates the evolution of meaning of conceptual metaphors, which has a considerable impact on the way how people understand and represent reality. The present article focuses on the mechanism of metaphorical meaning extension studied within the framework of the cognitive theory of metaphor, and reflecting on the key role of semiotic representation of meaning (re)construction. The study is a part of the ongoing research on the contemporary tendencies in term formation patterns in the working languages and the principles of knowledge representation in scientific and technical communication (Iljinska et al. 2014; Iljinska, Smirnova 2012; Platonova 2013). In order to illustrate the processes characteristic of the contemporary professional language in such fields as civil engineering and architecture, and to analyze the terms based on a definite conceptual model in contrastive perspective in three working languages: English, Latvian, and Russian, a conceptual metaphor BUILDING IS A BODY has been chosen.