The technical boom, globalization and ongoing development of new technologies lead to the creation of novel terms that are required to denote the new phenomena and describe changes taking place in the related scientific and technical fields. As a result, contemporary technical texts (e. g. texts on the issues of environment and ecology) are rich in terms, which are context-sensitive, i. e. they are polysemous, vary across registers, possess many intra-field synonyms, etc. It means that in order to perform a well-grounded structural-semantic analysis of the context-bound terms used in the contemporary technical texts, it is required to investigate the communicative setting, i. e. context, as it not only determines, to a great extent, the meaning of a term in a text, but also reflects the intentions of the author and influences the text acceptability by the readership. The author of the present article considers different approaches to the analysis of the multidimensional nature of a context, investigating its types and constituent elements, as well as studying the relationships between a context and a text (standards of textuality). The author illustrates the analysed theoretical findings with the empirical examples from the thematic field “environment and ecology” in English and Latvian.