What it is
A calque borrows an expression but translates its components. The source form does not appear in the target text; its internal structure does. What is imported is a way of naming something, assembled out of target-language material.
Vinay and Darbelnet treated the calque as a special kind of borrowing and divided it in two. A lexical calque respects the syntactic structure of the target language while introducing a new manner of expression into it: the pieces are target pieces, arranged in a target pattern, and only the naming idea is imported. A structural calque, by contrast, brings in a construction that the target language did not previously have, and their own illustration is the French Compliments de la Saison, modelled on English Compliments of the Season. Both kinds may fossilize over time and pass into ordinary usage, at which point the speaker who uses them is no longer calquing anything.
Newmark, writing about the same operation under the name through-translation, draws the line more tightly. He is describing the transfer of terms that are already recognized, such as the names of international organizations and established compounds, and he does not present the procedure as a licence to coin new target expressions on a source pattern. This is the practical disagreement in the record: Vinay and Darbelnet describe calquing as something translators do and sometimes should do, while Newmark describes it as something translators should follow where the target community has already done it.
Against the neighbouring techniques: borrowing keeps the source form, calque keeps only the source pattern, and literal translation reuses target items that already carry the sense without assembling anything new.
When it applies
- An institution, instrument or programme has an official name built by the same compositional route in both languages.
- The domain names its concepts transparently, and an opaque loan would hide the motivation that the source term makes visible.
- The target language forms compounds productively, so the assembled term reads as ordinary word formation rather than as an import.
- The source expression is a recent coinage with no settled counterpart, and its components are stable enough to survive the transfer.
Examples
EN>FR
- Source: skyscraper
- Target: gratte-ciel
- Comment: A lexical calque of the classic type. The naming idea is taken over, but the assembly follows a native French pattern of verb plus object, so nothing foreign enters the grammar. The form has long since fossilized: no present-day translator is making a decision here.
EN>TR
- Source: skyscraper
- Target: gökdelen
- Comment: The same concept calqued into a typologically distant language, from gök (sky) and delen (piercing). The motivating image is preserved while the morphology is entirely native, which is the mark of a successful calque and the reason the word never reads as a loan.
EN>DE
- Source: That makes no sense.
- Target: Das macht keinen Sinn.
- Comment: A contested structural calque. The traditional German collocations are Sinn ergeben and Sinn haben; the pattern with machen follows the English verb and has spread widely in general usage while remaining marked in edited prose. It illustrates the fossilization argument in progress, and the fact that a calque under way is not yet a term.
Watch out for
Calquing is the technique most likely to produce something that looks like a term and is not one. The output is grammatical, transparent and entirely absent from target usage, which makes it hard to detect by reading alone and easy to detect by searching.
- Verify before coining. If the target community has already named the concept, the calque is simply wrong, however well built. Newmark's restriction of through-translation to recognized terms is the safer working rule.
- Watch for false transparency. A component-by-component rendering can be perfectly formed and still denote a different concept, particularly where one of the components is a term of art with a narrower sense in the target legal or technical system.
- In binding text a newly calqued term should be flagged rather than presented as settled. Where no equivalent exists, the honest instruments are a translation label, a gloss or a note.
References
- Vinay, J.-P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais: méthode de traduction. Paris: Didier. English translation by J. C. Sager & M.-J. Hamel (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, Benjamins Translation Library 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 32–33.
- Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall, p. 84.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Benjamins Translation Library 123, Ch. 4.
- Molina, L. & Hurtado Albir, A. (2002). "Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach." Meta 47(4), 498–512.