Abstract: This work examines the fundamental differences between legal systems, defining uniqueness of the Russian-language and English-language criminal legal discourses, which should be taken into consideration during communication. Moving general-to-specific, the authors analyze the main differences at the legal system level, directly impacting translation of criminal procedural terminology (primary source of law, its role in formation of juridical technique, etc.), and concentrate their attention on the unique traits of lingual and non-lingual element (idea of the criminal legal system, ways of verbalization, etc.), characteristic to Russian and Anglo-American criminal legal discourses. The novelty of this research is justified by the fact that extralinguistic factors of legal discourse and their role during representation has only been generally studied, without sufficient work being done on verbalization of criminal legal system in the Russian and English languages. Referring to separate articles of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, the authors propose a way of transmitting the essence of the Russian legal institution of investigation and the stage of preliminary inquiry by means of Anglo-American legal terminology.