English loan translations in Polish in the area of computers: Syntactic aspects

Abstract The paper aims to discuss selected syntactic aspects of English loan translations in Polish in the sphere of computers and the Internet. The study is based on the corpus of informal Polish, collected and analyzed by the author of the study. All the texts have been read in their entirety by the author, and possible loan translations have been noted. Then, with the help of specific criteria, a group of English loan translations have been gathered. Altogether, 467 types of loan translation have been found (6,206 tokens). They are grouped according to specific syntactic properties, such as the observance of (or deviation from) the syntax of their English models. The study shows that most of the calques do not retain the original English arrangement but rather adapt it morphosyntactically to the recipient language, i.e. Polish. Calques that maintain the English order, and sometimes display an untypical pattern in Polish, are clearly in the minority. Additionally, theoretical problems connected with the syntactic classification of calques are also discussed at some length.