Problems in Studying Loan Translations Alicja Witalisz Pedagogical University of Kraków, Poland Covert borrowing is so much more important than the more obvious loanwords. (Haugen 1956: 766) ABSTRACT: The paper addresses selected key theoretical and methodological problems in studying loan translations, related to their definition, typology, identification, extraction, verification and other minor issues. While European and American language contact literature abounds in multilingual examples of loan translations and in their varied typologies, relatively little attention has been devoted to the problems concerning their identification, contact-induced status and corpus-assisted verification. The paper offers a brief overview of loan translation terminology, typologies, and terminological conflicts, and provides a set of linguistic and extralinguistic identification criteria useful in the recognition of loan translations, followed by a comment on the limitations of electronic search tools in the automatic extraction and analysis of loan translations. Despite the problematic issues involved in the studying of covert loans, the paper concludes with an expression of the need for extensive cross-linguistic corpus-based studies on one- and multi-word loan translations sourced in English, which is the current donor of Pan-European idiomatic expressions. KEYWORDS: loan translation, anglicism, covert borrowing, language contact, calque identification criteria 1. Introduction Lexical borrowing is not a homogeneous process. Ranging from complete morphemic importation to complete morphemic substitution, it may result in a variety of loan types1 that exhibit various degrees of foreignness. It is not uncommon for the various loan types to coexist in the recipient language users’ speech, being formally different but semantically equivalent lexical realizations of the same foreign etymon. Overt loans (loanwords), such as Eng1 We reserve the term “borrowing” to refer to the process itself; the result of the borrowing process is labeled generically as a “loan.”
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