This article provides a brief analysis of the national and cultural identity of English and Russian proverbs and sayings in the context of two variants of the world conceptual vision. The main task is to show some features of their translatability and transferability as the substrates of intercultural communication.

national and cultural identity, intercultural communication, proverb, saying, translatability, untranslatability, parametric description, functional and morphological description, collective substrate of language, specific mechanisms of semantic interaction, phraseological unit, semantic matching