Translational Techniques

So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out.

This is how you are to build it: The ark is to be 450 feet long, 75 feet wide and 45 feet high.

Make a roof for it and finish the ark to within 18 inches of the top. Put a door in the side of the ark and make lower, middle and upper decks (Gen 6:14-16 NIV).

Which of these two texts sounds more colorful?

The use of borrowings enables ‘immersion’ in other culture and epoch, and makes the literary text vivid.

On the other hand, overuse of the foreign words makes the text difficult for both reading and understanding. It is necessary to keep a balance!

When borrowings are not desirable for translation?

• If the loanwords are not historicisms
• If we have widely accepted lexical equivalents in TL
• If the borrowings do not play any emotional or aesthetic part.

Example: English words юзер (user), акаунт (account), стікер (sticker), лузер (loser) and others in Ukrainian; all of them have equivalents in Ukrainian – користувач, рахунок / облік, наклейка, невдаха.

Calque

A calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language and translated literally, i. e. from the corresponding root and following the same derivative patterns (if possible, of course), or word-for-word models (phrases and compound words).

A calque is an alternative to borrowing: instead of the use of a foreign word / phrase, a new word is created by using the means of TL.

We can discern two kinds of calques:

• Lexical calque.
• Phrase calque.

Lexical calques

At a certain period of the history of languages these words were considered as neologisms, but with the laps of time they became widely accepted in the target language:

standpoint – English (< Germ. Standpunkt)