What Is a Calque? Borrowing a Phrase by Translating It Piece by Piece

A language taking an expression from another can do it two ways. It can import the foreign word more or less intact, adapting the pronunciation, which gives the ordinary loanword and which is conspicuous because the result frequently looks and sounds foreign. Or it can take the expression apart, translate each component into native material and reassemble it in the same structure, which produces a phrase made entirely of familiar words that nonetheless carries a foreign pattern of thought. The second process is a calque, from a French word meaning to trace or copy, and its defining feature is invisibility, since the result uses ordinary vocabulary and gives no signal of its origin. That is why speakers use hundreds of them without recognising any.

Several very common expressions came in this way:

• •Skyscraper, translated into dozens of languages component by component rather than borrowed as a word
• •Loanword itself, which is a calque of a German compound, making the term an instance of the thing it names
• •Flea market, from a French phrase translated directly
• •Masterpiece, following a Dutch and German construction
• •It goes without saying, which reproduces a French idiom rather than any native English expression
• •Long time no see, whose origin is disputed and is generally attributed to a calque from an Asian language
• •Adam's apple, a translation of a Latin anatomical phrase that itself may rest on a mistranslation

Calques arrive in waves when one language is being used to render a large body of material from another. Christian and philosophical vocabulary entered Germanic and Slavic languages largely by this route, with Greek and Latin terms translated component by component into native material, producing words that look entirely native and were built to order, and the vocabulary of conscience, of grace and of a great deal of abstract thought came in this way. Scientific and technical terminology spreads similarly in the present, with new English compounds translated piecewise into other languages rather than borrowed. Deliberate language planning uses the technique heavily, since a body charged with avoiding foreign words can nonetheless take the concept by translating the parts, which is how modern Icelandic and modern Hebrew built technical vocabularies. Translation of sacred texts is historically the single largest source.

The invisibility deserves an explanation, since it is what distinguishes the phenomenon from ordinary borrowing. A word imported whole keeps foreign sounds, foreign spelling or a foreign shape, so speakers can tell it is not native even when they do not know its source, and dictionaries flag it. A phrase assembled from native material carries no such marker, and the only evidence of its origin is historical, meaning the date it first appears and whether an equivalent existed beforehand in the other language. Establishing that requires corpus evidence that exists only for well-documented languages and only for recent centuries. For earlier periods and less documented languages the identification depends on judgement, which is why lists of calques differ between sources and why individual claims are frequently contested by specialists.

Several things sit close to the category and distinguishing them is genuinely awkward. A semantic loan takes an existing native word and gives it an additional meaning copied from a foreign equivalent, which changes no form at all and is even harder to detect. A partial calque translates some components and borrows others, giving a hybrid. An expression may also arise independently in two languages, since the same metaphor occurs to different people, so resemblance is not proof of borrowing and the argument in any particular case rests on dates and on documented contact. Folk etymology can produce something that looks like a calque and is not. And a phrase translated badly enough may be unrecognisable as a translation, which means the true number of calques in any language is certainly larger than the number that can be identified.

The process takes a foreign expression apart, translates each component into native material and reassembles it, producing a phrase made of familiar words carrying a foreign pattern. Skyscraper, flea market, masterpiece and it goes without saying all arrived this way. Translation of sacred and philosophical texts is historically the largest source, and the invisibility means the true number is larger than anyone can count.