Calque

In <a href="/facts/Linguistics/oQuamvf2">linguistics</a>, a calque or loan translation is a <a href="/facts/Word/UXNbIy5y">word</a> or <a href="/facts/Phrase/mbnD0ksH">phrase</a> borrowed from another <a href="/facts/Language/IRcTok2q">language</a> by <a href="/facts/Literal_translation/0cF1oFRh">literal</a> word-for-word or root-for-root <a href="/facts/Translation/2foI82so">translation</a>. When used as a <a href="/facts/Verb/zp42buvn">verb</a>, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new word or phrase (<a href="/facts/Lexeme/CtHGorv4">lexeme</a>) in the target language. For instance, the English word skyscraper has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example Wolkenkratzer in German, arranha-céu in Portuguese, wolkenkrabber in Dutch, rascacielo in Spanish, grattacielo in Italian, gökdelen in Turkish, and matenrō (摩天楼) in Japanese.
Calques, like direct borrowings, often function as linguistic gap-fillers, emerging when a language lacks existing vocabulary to express new ideas, technologies, or objects. This phenomenon is widespread and is often attributed to the shared conceptual frameworks across human languages. Speakers of different languages tend to perceive the world through common categories such as time, space, and quantity, making the translation of concepts across languages both possible and natural.
Calquing is distinct from <a href="/facts/Phono-semantic_matching/6RxAHGKU">phono-semantic matching</a>: while calquing includes <a href="/facts/Semantic/1L4WwLAP">semantic</a> translation, it does not consist of <a href="/facts/Phonetic/ljAVT8fv">phonetic</a> matching—i.e., of retaining the approximate <a href="/facts/Sound/DlKXlPuF">sound</a> of the borrowed word by matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existing word or <a href="/facts/Morpheme/4JNcPMHs">morpheme</a> in the target language.
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.

Calque open-in-new

Calque