TIMES change, as the proverb goes ‘other times, other manners’, which means each generation has its own way of life and standard of behaviour. So one has to assimilate the new norms and adjust to them as sometimes it does not take generations to be pushed to the wall though one was enjoying being on the same page just a little while ago, say, a few years ago.

When you are on the same page you smilingly say in Urdu aik safhe par hain and when you feel being pushed to the wall you shout deevaar se lagaayaa jaa rahaa hai, notwithstanding the fact that these are literal translations from English. Urdu has borrowed these expressions, and many others, by translating them literally. When a language borrows a word or phrase from another language and translates it word for word, it is called calque. Calque is also known as loan translation, say linguists, and this kind of lexical borrowing is quite common in languages across the board.

But calque or loan translation is not to be mixed up with ‘literal translation’, which is applied when a piece of text is translated into another language by translating words individually, ignoring the nuances, context and idiomatic expressions or figurative use. For example, writing ‘God’s cow’ would be a literal translation of Allah mian ki gai, ignoring the metaphorical use and hence rendering it incorrect, as in Urdu it actually means ‘a simpleton, someone easily misguided’. A loan translation is, therefore, a word-for-word translation of a word or an expression that already exists in a donor language. But literal translation is an out-of-context, incorrectly translated text into a borrowing language (sometimes donor language is called source language and borrowing language is called recipient language).

“In linguistics”, says Philip Durkin in his scholarly work Borrowed Words: A History of Loanwords in English, “the term ‘borrowing’ describes a process in which one language replicates a linguistic feature from another language, either wholly or partly. The metaphorical use of the word ‘borrowing’ to describe this process has well-known flaws: nothing is taken away from what is termed the donor language, and there is no assumption that the ‘borrowing’ or ‘loan’ will ever be returned” (Oxford, 2015, page 3).

Calque or loan translations are a way of creating new words in borrowing languages, as Durkin says “the most characteristic examples of creation of a new word in a borrowing situation are loan translations, in which the newly created word to some degree ‘translates’ the compositional elements of the foreign-language word” (Ibid, page 164).

When it comes to Urdu, we find many loan translations or calques being used in Urdu and many of them are recent coinages. It is a pity that hardly ever any research has been carried out on the topic, except for a mini-thesis, by Muhammad Raees, a student at Karachi University’s English department, some 20 years ago. Our PhD and MPhil scholars at Urdu departments of universities should rather consider doing some research on topics like calques instead of on the poetry of every Tom, Dick and Harry — undeserving and virtually unknown albeit self-glorifying nobodies.

Here is a list of some calques used in Urdu, verbatim translations of English phraseology. Some of these words or phrases have been taken form Muhammad Raees’s above-said work:aahani haath: strict or rigorous control, iron hand.aik safhe par hona: to think in a similar way, be on the same page.chai ki pyaali mein toofan: unnecessary fuss over a trivial matter, storm in a teacup.deevaar se lagaanaa: to humiliate and force into a desperate situation, to push to the wall.kali bher: someone not considered part of the group, a black sheep.muqaddas gai: someone supposed to be above criticism, a sacred cow.safed haathi: something useless but costly to maintain, a white elephant.zameeni haqaaeq: real or actual situation as opposed to a perceived one, ground realities.

But it must be kept in mind that sometimes same expressions do exist in other languages, but they might have been coined indigenously, independent of any extraneous influence. Proverbs especially fall in this category as there are hundreds of proverbs that have the same gist or almost similar, even identical, wordings in several languages. The reason is proverbs record popular wisdom, something common to entire humanity. Therefore, some Urdu proverbs may sound like calques, but they might have been grown locally.

Muraqq’a-i-Aqvaal-o-Amsaal, an interesting work by Syed Yousuf Bukhari Dehlvi, is a case in point. Published by Karachi’s Anjuman Taraqqi-i-Urdu back in 1994, the work presents identical or corresponding proverbs in several languages, such as Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Sindhi, Punjabi and Pashto. They all cannot be calques.

drraufparekh@yahoo.com

Published in Dawn, July 8th, 2024