Translation technique: Calque
Jousset, Manuela
Souto, Jazmín
Examples
Names of places
• sangre azul - blue-blood
• rascacielos - skycraper
• tarjeta de crédito - credit card
• alta tecnología - high technology
• disco compacto - compact disc
• correo electrónico - electronic mail
• alta resolución - high resolution
• enlace - link (internet)
• ratón - mouse (computer)
• nave espacial - spaceship
For some names, particularly place-names, a standard TL equivalent may exist in the form of calque.
I.e.: the White House
la Casa Blanca
In the absence of a standard calque translation, the option of creating a calque may sometimes be open to the translator.
I.e.: ‘Colombia: país de Eldorado’
‘Colombia: the country of Eldorado’
‘Colombia: the Land of Eldorado’
Types of calque
i.e. Café (French) - coffee
Bazaar (Persian) - market
Definition
• Paronymous calque (or loan word)
• Orthographic calque
• Typographic calque
• Syntactic or structural calque
i.e. names of people, places and ethnicities
i.e. capital letters, italics
It's a special kind of borrowing where a language borrows a word or an expression from another language and translates literally each of its elements.
“One of the ways in which a language renews its lexicon”
i.e. 'in order to' - en orden a
'to find guilty' - encontrar culpable