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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. When 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 word or phrase (lexeme) 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 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.
Some linguists refer to a phonological calque, in which the pronunciation of a word is imitated in the other language.Yihua, Zhang, and Guo Qiping. 2010. "An Ideal Specialised Lexicography for Learners in China based on English-Chinese Specialised Dictionaries." Pp. 171–92 in Specialised Dictionaries for Learners, edited by P. A. F. Olivera. Berlin: de Gruyter. p. 187. For example, the English word "radar" becomes the similar-sounding Chinese word (p=léidá), which literally means "to arrive (as fast) as thunder".
The word loanword is a calque of the German language noun Lehnwort. In contrast, the term calque is a loanword, from the French noun ("tracing, imitation, close copy").Knapp, Robbin D. 27 January 2011. " Robb: German English Words." Robb: Human Languages.
Another example of a common morpheme-by-morpheme loan-translation is of the English language word "", a kenning-like term which may be calqued using the word for "sky" or "cloud" and the word, variously, for "scrape", "scratch", "pierce", "sweep", "kiss", etc. At least 54 languages have their own versions of the English word.
Some Germanic and Slavic languages derived their words for "translation" from words meaning "carrying across" or "bringing across", calquing from the Latin translātiō or trādūcō.Christopher Kasparek, "The Translator's Endless Toil", The Polish Review, vol. XXVIII, no. 2, 1983, p. 83.
The Latin weekday names came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanica: the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii dies (later mercredi in modern French language), was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" ( Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.
Since at least 1926, the term calque has been attested in English through a publication by the linguist :
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