Understanding specialized discourse requires the identification and activation of knowledge structures underlying the text. The expansion and enhancement of knowledge is thus an important part of the specialized translation process (Faber 2015). This paper explores how the analysis of terminological meaning can be addressed from the perspective of Frame- Based Terminology (FBT) (Faber 2012, 2015), a cognitive approach to domain-specific language, which directly links specialized knowledge representation to cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics. In this study, context expansion was explored in a three-stage procedure: from single terms to multi-word terms, from multi-word terms to phrases, and from phrases to frames. Our results showed that this approach provides valuable insights into the identification of the knowledge structures underlying specialized texts.