Calque

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 phono-semantic matching: while calquing includes semantic translation, it does not consist of phonetic matching—i.e., of retaining the approximate sound of the borrowed word by matching it with a similar-sounding pre-existing word or morpheme 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.

Types

One system classifies calques into five groups. This terminology is not universal:

• Phraseological calques: idiomatic phrases are translated word for word. For example, "it goes without saying" calques the French ça va sans dire.
• Syntactic calques: syntactic functions or constructions of the source language are imitated in the target language, in violation of their meaning. For example, the use of "by" instead of "with" in the phrase "fine by me" is thought to have come from Yiddish bei, namely from the 1930s Yiddish Broadway musical song title Bei Mir Bistu Shein, lit. 'To Me You're Beautiful'.
• Loan-translations: words are translated morpheme by morpheme, or component by component, into another language.
• Semantic calques (also known as semantic loans): additional meanings of the source word are transferred to the word with the same primary meaning in the target language. As described below, 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 computer mouse.
• Morphological calques: the inflection of a word is transferred. Some authors call this a morpheme-by-morpheme translation.

Some 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 雷达 (pinyin: léidá), which literally means "to arrive (as fast) as thunder".

Partial

Partial calques, or loan blends, 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" (< German Leberwurst) and "apple strudel" (< German Apfelstrudel).

Semantic

The computer mouse was named in English for its resemblance to the animal. Many other languages use their word for mouse for the computer mouse, sometimes using a diminutive or, in Chinese, adding the word cursor (标), or the word "scroll" (Chinese: 滑; pinyin: huá) making shǔbiāo 'mouse cursor' (simplified Chinese: 鼠标; traditional Chinese: 鼠標; pinyin: shǔbiāo) or huáshǔ, "scrolling mouse" (Chinese: 滑鼠; pinyin: huáshǔ). Another example is the Spanish word ratón that means both the animal and the computer mouse.