In linguistics, a calque () or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word, or root-for-root translation.
Used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components so as to create a new lexeme in the target language.
"Calque" itself is a loanword from the French noun calque ("tracing; imitation; close copy"); the verb calquer means "to trace; to copy, to imitate closely"; papier calque is "tracing paper". The word "loanword" is a calque of the German word Lehnwort, just as "loan translation" is a calque of Lehnübersetzung.
Proving that a word is a calque sometimes requires more documentation than does an untranslated loanword because, in some cases, a similar phrase might have arisen in both languages independently. This is less likely to be the case when the grammar of the proposed calque is quite different from that of the borrowing language or when the calque contains less obvious imagery.
Calquing is distinct from phono-semantic matching. While calquing includes semantic translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching (i.e. retaining the approximate sound of the borrowed word through matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existing word or morpheme in the target language).
Types
One system classifies calques into five groups:
- the phraseological calque, with idiomatic phrases being translated word-for-word.
- the syntactical calque, with syntactical functions or constructions of the source language being imitated in the target language.
- the loan-translation, with words being translated morpheme-by-morpheme or component-by-component into another language.
- the semantic calque, with additional meanings of the source word being transferred to the word with the same primary meaning in the target language. That is also called a "semantic loan".
- the morphological calque, with the inflection of a word being transferred.
That terminology is not universal. Some authors call a morphological calque a "morpheme-by-morpheme translation".
Examples
Phraseological calque: "flea market"
The common English phrase "flea market" is a phraseological calque of the French "marché aux puces" ("market with fleas"), as are the Czech "bleÅ¡Ã trh", the Dutch "vlooienmarkt", the Finnish "kirpputori", the German "Flohmarkt", the Hebrew "שוק ×"פשפשי×", the Hungarian "bolhapiac", the Italian "mercatino delle pulci", the Norwegian "loppemarked", the Polish "pchli targ", the Russian "блошиный рынок", the Serbo-Croatian "buvljak", the Spanish "mercado de pulgas" (unused), the Turkish "bit pazarı", and so on.
Loan translation: "skyscraper"
An example of a morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation is the French expression, gratte-ciel ("scrapes-sky"), modeled after the English "skyscraper". Similarly in:
Loan translation: translatio and traductio
The Latin word translatio ("a transferring") derives from trans, "across" + latus, "borne". (Latus is the past participle of ferre, "to carry".)
The Germanic languages and some Slavic languages calqued their words for "translation" from the above Latin word, translatio, substituting their respective Germanic or Slavic root words for the Latin roots.
The remaining Slavic languages instead calqued their words for "translation" from an alternative Latin word, traductio, itself derived from traducere ("to lead across" or "to bring across", from trans, "across" + ducere, "to lead" or "to bring").
The Romance languages, deriving directly from Latin, did not need to calque their equivalent words for "translation". Instead, they simply adapted the second of the above two alternative Latin words, traductio. Thus, Aragonese: traducción; Catalan: traducció; French: traduction; Italian: traduzione; Portuguese: tradução; Romanian: traducere; and Spanish: traducción. The English verb "to translate" similarly derives from the Latin translatio, itself derived from transferre, "to transfer": in this case, "transferred" (translatus) from one language to another.
Following are the Germanic- and Slavic-language calques for "translation", as discussed above:
Semantic calque: mouse
The computer mouse was named in English for its resemblance to the animal. Many other languages have extended their own native word for "mouse" to include the computer mouse.
See also
Notes
References
- Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, pp. 83â€"87.
- Robb: German English Words germanenglishwords.com
- Ghil'ad Zuckermann, "Hybridity versus Revivability: Multiple Causation, Forms and Patterns", Journal of Language Contact, Varia 2, 2009, pp. 40â€"67.
- Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.
External links
- EtymOnline
- Merriam Webster Online
