Calque

In linguistics, a calque (/ˈkælk/) 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".[1] The word "loanword" is a calque of the German word Lehnwort, just as "loan translation" is a calque of Lehnübersetzung.[2]

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.[3] 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:[4]

That terminology is not universal. Some authors call a morphological calque a "morpheme-by-morpheme translation".[5]

Examples

Phraseological calque: "flea market"

The common English phrase "flea market" is a phraseological calque of the French "marché aux puces" ("market with fleas"),[6] as are the Czech "bleší trh", the Dutch "vlooienmarkt", the Finnish "kirpputori", the German "Flohmarkt", the Hebrew "שוק הפשפשים", 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[7] 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").[8]

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;[9] Catalan: traducció;[9] French: traduction;[9] Italian: traduzione;[9] Portuguese: tradução;[9] Romanian: traducere;[9] and Spanish: traducción.[9] 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.[8][10]

Following are the Germanic- and Slavic-language calques for "translation", as discussed above:[8]

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

  1. ↑ The New Cassell's French Dictionary: French-English, English-French, New York, Funk & Wagnalls Company, 1962, p. 122.
  2. ↑ Robb: German English Words germanenglishwords.com
  3. ↑ Zuckermann, Ghil'ad (2003). Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.
  4. ↑ May Smith, The Influence of French on Eighteenth-century Literary Russian, p. 29-30.
  5. ↑ Claude Gilliot, "The Authorship of the Qur'ān" in Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur'an in its Historical Context, p. 97
  6. ↑ "flea market", The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, 2000
  7. ↑ Except in the case of the Dutch equivalent, "vertaling"—a "re-language-ing": ver + talen = "to change the language".
  8. 1 2 3 Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, p. 83.
  9. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 "leading across" or "putting across"
  10. ↑ Were the English verb "translate" calqued, it would be "overset", akin to the calques in other Germanic languages.
  11. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 "putting across"

References

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