Also known as loan translation
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" (or "clouds") and "scrape" in each language, such as in Dutch.
A calque is a word or phrase that one language borrows from another by translating it piece-by-piece rather than adopting it wholesale. This matters because it shows how languages influence each other creatively—for example, many languages created their own versions of "skyscraper" by combining their own words for "sky" and "scrape" rather than just using the English term.
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).