This paper addresses the problem of terminological variation in oncology due to wide public interest in cancer and the different social situations in which the terminology is used. The paper underlines the usefulness of phraseological information for conceptual and discourse analysis. One of the things that should be taken into account in the creation of terminographic tools is the existence of context-dependent phraseological units. The automatic processing of contextual information in texts of specialized content requires a descriptive study of phraseological units in different contexts. This article gives an example of such a phraseological analysis as applied to a corpus of English and Spanish biomedical texts in the domain of oncology.