Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- transitive verb To make a loan translation from (a word in another language).
from The Century Dictionary.
- See
calk .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- transitive verb See 2d
calk , v. t.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun A word or phrase in a language formed by
word-for-word ormorpheme -by-morphemetranslation of a word in another language. - verb transitive To
adopt (a word or phrase) from one language to another bysemantic translation of its parts.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun an expression introduced into one language by translating it from another language
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Ringbom also suggests that misspellings, borrowings and coinage are transfer of form while calque is transfer of meaning.
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Somehow I have a feeling that конъюнктурный in this case is a calque from the English conjecture
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Somehow I have a feeling that конъюнктурный in this case is a calque from the English conjecture, in the sense that the previous editors presumed to be able to second-guess how Dostoyevsky's text would have looked were he to have written it at the time of republication, somewhat like those "plain text" editions of Shakespeare.
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2. You don't seem to have paid attention to the word "calque" in my comment.
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This is borne out by empirical research (e.g Olsen 1999) CLI researchers tend to classify Lexical transfer as misspellings, borrowings, coinage and calque.
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The word "bushmeat" is a word-for-word translation or calque of the French phrase viande de brousse.
Week in Words Erin McKean 2011
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Dr. G, in the NT as in the Septuagint, it's regarded to be a calque from Hebrew and Aramaic.
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I have heard that “are you coming with?” is a calque of German “kommst du mit?”
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That is to say, Sumerian Utu-zi 'Life-breath of the sun' would have become a partial calque Ut(a)-napishtim which would be reinterpreted by scribes and priests to mean 'he found (uta-) life-breath (napishtim)' (nb. the replacement of Sum. utu 'sun' with Bab. ūta 'found') and thus back into Sumerian with the reformulated Zi-ud-sura 'Life of long days', now implying a character who has found immortality.
Archive 2009-11-01 2009
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Home » For Translators » What is a calque?
What is a calque? 2009
whichbe commented on the word calque
A lexical borrowing strategy in which the recipient language, rather than copying the phonological form of a word or term, translates each morpheme directly into the native language, creating an equivalent idiom. For example, early translators of the Bible in English rendered the Latin term remorsus "remorse" as again-bite" and the Latin term reflectere "reflect" as "again-shine."
June 20, 2007
rolig commented on the word calque
I like this word because it is short, almost clipped, yet expresses an idea that is both very specific and reflective of the general human tendency of borrowing and creating patterns. Though it's a term from linguistics and etymology, I suspect it can apply to other areas of human thought as well, where something alien is domesticated in such a way that its alien roots are hidden, are expressed only obliquely through translation.
November 29, 2007
knitandpurl commented on the word calque
"Christine's Chemin de long estude is a calque of Dante's "lungo studio," that is, Christine explicitly conceives her literary career as a learned continuation in the vernacular of the poetic archievement of Vergil."
- Earl Jeffrey Richards's Introduction to Christine de Pizan's Book of the City of Ladies, pp xlvii-xlviii of the Persea books 1998 paperback
January 23, 2016