Calque


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. When 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 . 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.

Types

One system classifies calques into five groups:
This terminology is not universal. Some authors call a morphological calque a "morpheme-by-morpheme translation". Other linguists refer to a phonological calque, in which the pronunciation of a word is imitated in the other language; for example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word .

Loan blend

Loan blends or partial calques translate some parts of a compound but not others. 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 include "liverwurst" and "apple strudel".

Examples

Loan translation: "flea market"

The common English phrase "flea market" is a loan translation of the French . Other national variations include:
Another example of a common morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation, in a multitude of languages, is that of the English word :
The Latin word "a transferring" derives from "to transfer", from "across" + "bear". The Germanic languages and some Slavic languages calqued their words for "translation" from the Latin word translātiō, 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 trāductiō, itself derived from .
The West Slavic languages adopted the translātiō pattern. The East Slavic languages and the South Slavic languages adopted the trāductiō 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, trāductiō. Thus, Aragonese: ; Catalan: ; French: ; Italian: ; Portuguese: ; Romanian: ; and Spanish:.
The English verb "to translate" was borrowed from the Latin translātiō, rather than being calqued. Were the English verb "translate" calqued, it would be "overset", akin to the calques in other Germanic languages. The Icelandic word for "translate", , was not calqued from Latin, nor was it borrowed; were the Icelandic verb calqued, it would be something like "ofursetja", analogously to the other Germanic words.
Following are the Germanic- and Slavic-language calques for "translation":
;Germanic languages
;Slavic languages
;Slavic languages
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 sense of the "computer mouse".