The following paper deals with the importance of genre in academic and professional engineering discourse. The main objective is to explore the use of analogy and metaphor in one specific genre, namely civil engineering research journal articles both in English and in Spanish. Thus, we will start by briefly outlining the use of metaphor in technical discourse, to continue by looking at the use of analogy, metaphor and metonymy in engineering journal articles and additionally at the possible cross-linguistic variations of its use in English and Spanish. A number of observations and conclusions will finally follow. (Contains 2 figures.)