Calque - loan translation: words in the mirror
Mirror mirror
show me the water of life: whiskey.
In Scotland and
Ireland, whiskey is still called usquebaugh. It literally means water of life.
The term is short for whiskybae, which is another spelling of usquebaugh, from
Gaelic uiscebeatha.
These are
literally word-for-word translations. In linguistics, we call them loan
translations.
A loan
translation is a special kind of loan word, but each of the elements of the
phrase are translated. But as Yousef Bader says, "loan translations are
easier to understand [than loan words] because they use existing elements in
the borrowing language, whose expressive capacity is thereby enriched" (in
Language, Discourse, and Translation in the West and Middle East, 1994).
They also known
as calques. The word calque comes from French and means ‘copy’. Calque is a
construction while loans are phonetically and morphologically adapted
borrowings into the recipient language.
But do languages
borrow only compound words and phrases or do they also borrow other kinds of
elements of the language?
Mirror mirror
show me It goes without saying in French: ça va sans dire
It’s literally a
word-for-word translation of the phrase. It’s a Phraseological Calque. It means
one directly translates a phrase in a primary language into the secondary one.
Mirror mirror
show me the sentence “We’re going to the store, are you coming with?” in
German. kommen Sit mit? It’s a literal translation of the German sentence
structure. It’s a morphological Calque. Languages can borrow the structure from
a different language that is not necessarily the norm in the target
language.
Mirror mirror
show me the expression “to find guilty” in Spanish: encontrar culpable which is
literally a translation from English. It is called Syntactic Calque which
occurs in largely bilingual areas and is usually the result of mistranslation.
Mirror mirror
show me the meanings of the word ‘star’ in Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Polish,
Finnish, and Vietnamese. Star has two meanings in several languages: the
astronomic body and also someone famous after the English star. It is called
Semantic Calque. It occurs where a word or phrase that has more than one
meaning in the primary language adopts the alternate meaning in another
language.
Pay attention!
Not all calque-like words are calques. Sometimes similar phrases can arise in
different languages independently. Usually, we can state that a word is a
calque almost for sure when the grammar of the calque is different from the
grammar of the borrowing language.
At the end we
can sum up what we have learned about calques.
A calque is a
literal translation of certain elements of the adopting language. We learned
that there are four types of calques:
the semantic
calque, where additional meanings of the source word are transferred to the
word with the same primary meaning in the target language;
the
phraseological calque, where idiomatic phrases are translated word-for-word;
the syntactic
calque, where a syntactic function or construction in the source language is
imitated in the target language;
the morphological calque, where the inflection of a word is transferred.
What calques do you know in your language?