In the article the author emphasizes the role of the computer corpus in giving new impetus to the development of contrastive linguistics and translation studies. The research mostly focuses on the meaning formation and word/term creation processes in various languages, i.e. English, Latvian and Russian. The author examines the practical issues of scientific-technical text translation in the fields of economics, ecology and architecture, with a review of meaning analysis tools (semantic field, thematic field, componential analysis), which are of significant value for both, detailed contrastive analysis and comprehensible translation.