s - Wyższa Szkoła Filologiczna we Wrocławiu

ALICJA WITALISZ
PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY OF CRACOW
English loan translations in Polish – preliminary
comments
ABSTRACT. The paper aims to provide a formal classification of English loan translations
which have been much on the increase in Polish since the socio-political transition in 1989.
Set expressions, such as, e.g., Polish biały kołnierzyk from English “white collar” or
Polish Pierwsza dama from English “First Lady”, are formed out of native linguistic
material but copy foreign structural and semantic patterns. Formal and semantic properties of
the translated versions of English set expressions allow a four-fold classification of loan
translations into loan translations proper, loan renditions, expressions following the Germanic
morpho-syntactic pattern and phraseological replicas. The article also offers a discussion of the
semantic processes that occur when a new expression is formed in a language as a result of
foreign influence. The processes in question include semantic importation and idiomatisation
as well as semantic reborrowing and reinterpretation. Since this class of borrowings is
continually growing and new instances appear daily in the Polish media, the article also
discusses the status of loan translations in the class of neologisms.
KEYWORDS. Loan translation, calque, phraseological replica, neologism, lexicalization,
semantic reborrowing.
1. Introduction
The paper aims to provide a formal classification of loan translations from
English (henceforth abbreviated as < E.), which constitute a continually growing
but much neglected type of borrowings in Polish (P.). The formal division
shall be followed by a discussion of the semantic processes that occur when
a new expression is formed in a language as a result of foreign influence. In
recent studies on English-Polish language contacts, conducted by Elżbieta
Mańczak-Wohlfeld (1995, 2004, 2006), much attention has been paid to other
types of borrowed elements, i.e., to loanwords. These types, as the research of
Andrzej Markowski (1992), Marcin Zabawa (2004), Alicja Witalisz (2007a) has
shown, undoubtedly construct the most copious group of loans in any European
language, and to English semantic loans, which have been much on the increase
since the socio-political transition in 1989. One other type of borrowed expressions,
not perceived as foreign by non-specialists though, are loan translations, 1
1
In this introductory section, I follow Einar Haugen’s (1950: 219–220) terminology and use
the term loan translation in a wider sense to refer to translated polymorphemic set expressions
which will later in the paper be split into several categories. I deliberately avoid the
LANGUAGES IN CONTACT 2011