Background of borrowed words in the english language and their translation

Abstract

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation. Used as a verb, "to calque" means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. "Calque" itself is a loan word from a French noun, and derives from the verb "calquer" (to trace, to copy). Loan translation is itself a calque of the German "Lehnubersetzung". Proving a word is a calque sometimes requires more documentation than an untranslated loan word, since 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 language proposed to be borrowing, or the calque contains less obvious imagery.