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English loan translations in Polish – preliminary comments 233
3.4. Culture-specific loan translations
It must be emphasized that a vast majority of the translated English fixed
expressions are culture-related, which best reflects the process of Old World
communities taking over certain American cultural patterns. The semantic fields
which are most numerously represented include the following: (1) working
style, making a career based on competition; (2) new occupations; (3) new
technologies and computers; (4) food and eating habits; (5) popular culture including
music, film, television, entertainment in general; (6) advertising; and (7)
American cultural phenomena (examples for each field in Witalisz 2007b).
4. Loan translations as neologisms
Although many of the loan translations and renditions from English are
already well-established in Polish and are commonly used both in the written
and spoken variety, the set is by no means closed. Novel English-sourced expressions
such as P. gorący ziemniak (< E. “hot potato”); P. ziemniak kanapowy
(< E. “couch potato”) or P. mieć coś z tyłu głowy (< E. “to have sth at the back
of one’s mind”), used in the Polish media, are not frequent but it seems that
their institutionalization (Bauer 1983: 48) is only a matter of time. This raises
the question of the status of loan translations and renditions in the class of neologisms.
Following Jean Tournier’s (1985: 21), discussed by Leonhard Lipka
(2002: 108), categorization of productive patterns, based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s
conception of linguistic sign, English phraseological units (when they
were first created) may be classified as morpho-semantic neologisms since both
the signified (French signifié) and signifier (signifiant) are concerned. May their
foreign translations then be considered representatives of the same category?
Tournier’s classification of neologisms (1985) lists adopting loanwords as an
external process, which theoretically excludes loan translations and renditions
as morpho-semantic neologisms. However, Tournier’s taxonomy takes into
account only adopted loanwords, which are certainly a much different type of
borrowed elements than loan translations. In the case of loanwords, there is no
sign of language productivity or users’ creativity as hardly any word-formation
processes are used; the foreign lexeme is imported both semantically and formally.
It seems, then, that loan translations and renditions which involve both
word-formation and semantic processes may be categorized as cases of morphosemantic
neologisms since both their form and meaning are new to the receiving
language.