Calque

In linguistics, a calque /kælk/ 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 itself 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]

  • the phraseological calque, with idiomatic phrases being translated word-for-word. For example, "that goes without saying" calques the French "cela va sans dire".[5]
  • the syntactic calque, with syntactic functions or constructions of the source language being imitated in the target language, in violation of their meaning. For example, in Spanish the legal term for “to find guilty” is properly "declarar culpable" (“to declare guilty”). Informal usage, however, is shifting to "encontrar culpable": a syntactic mapping of "to find" without a semantic correspondence in Spanish of “find” to mean “determine as true”.[6]
  • the loan-translation, with words being translated morpheme-by-morpheme or component-by-component into another language. The two morphemes of the Swedish word tonåring calque each part of the English "teenager": femton = "fifteen"; åring = "annual harvest".
  • the semantic calque, with additional meanings of the source word being transferred to the word with the same primary meaning in the target language. This is also called a "semantic loan". As described below, 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.
  • the morphological calque, with the inflection of a word being transferred.

This terminology is not universal. Some authors call a morphological calque a "morpheme-by-morpheme translation".[7]

Other linguists refer to the phonological calque, where the pronunciation of a word is imitated in the other language.[8] For example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word "雷达" (pinyin "léi dá").

Loan blend

Loan blends or partial calques translate some parts of a compound, but not others.[9] For example, the name of the Irish digital television service Saorview is a partial calque of that of the UK service Freeview, translating the first half of the word from English to Irish but leaving the second half unchanged. Other examples are: "liverwurst" (< German Leberwurst), "apple strudel" (< German Apfelstrudel).

Examples

Phraseological calque: "flea market"

The common English phrase "flea market" is a phraseological calque of the French "marché aux puces" ("market with fleas").[10] Other national variations include:

Loan translation: "skyscraper"

An example of a common morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation in a multitude of languages is that of the English word skyscraper:

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 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").[11]

The West Slavic languages adopted the "translatio" pattern. The East Slavic languages (except for Belarusian and Ukrainian) and the South Slavic languages adopted the "traductio" pattern.

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 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.[11] Were the English verb "translate" calqued, it would be "overset", akin to the calques in other Germanic languages.

Following are the Germanic- and Slavic-language calques for "translation":[11]

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. ↑ Overzetting (noun) and overzetten (verb) in the sense of "translation" and "to translate", respectively, are considered archaic. While omzetting may still be found in early modern literary works, it has been replaced entirely in modern Dutch by vertaling.

References

  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. ↑ Foreign Words. Fowler, H. W. 1908. The King's English
  6. ↑ If my Calqueulations are Correct, Paul Weston
  7. ↑ Claude Gilliot, "The Authorship of the Qur'ān" in Gabriel Said Reynolds, The Qur'an in its Historical Context, p. 97
  8. ↑ Specialised Dictionaries for Learners edited by Pedro Antonio Fuertes Olivera, p. 187
  9. ↑ Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology, sec. 5.1.4
  10. ↑ "flea market", The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, fourth edition, 2000 Archived 2007-03-11 at the Wayback Machine.
  11. 1 2 3 Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, p. 83.
  12. ↑ "overzetting" in Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal, IvdNT

Sources

  • Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, pp. 83–87.
  • 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. 40–67.
  • Ghil'ad Zuckermann, Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, ISBN 1-4039-1723-X.
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