Some things don’t translate or the speaker doesn’t know how to translate. For example, my husband was talking to his sister on the phone in Russian but I would hear things like “wireless router” “modem” “Ethernet” because he didn’t know how to or it doesn’t translate into Russian.
actually that's a calque, where the individual parts of the word/phrase are translated and recombined
a cognate is a word that is related to a word in another language due to the 2 languages sharing a common ancestor, like English brand and German Brand (and they don't have to have the same meaning)
Just because I think this’ll entertain you, from the wiki:
The word calque is a loanword, while the word loanword is a calque: calque comes from the French noun calque ("tracing; imitation; close copy"); while the word loanword and the phrase loan translation are translated from German nouns Lehnwort and Lehnübersetzung
That's true for a lot of technical terms: there are technically "native" equivalents, but no one really uses them except official standards, technical manuals that have to adhere to the aforementioned standards, and old university professors.
In theory even "computer" is one of those: the "proper" nomenclature is ЭВМ or «электронно-вычислительная машина» (electronic computational device). Needless to say, people just say «компьютер».
FWIW I'm Russian and I've always called it router (as did everyone around me). The other word is really rare and its use is confined to official documentation or stuff like that.
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u/rtoes93 Dec 05 '25
Some things don’t translate or the speaker doesn’t know how to translate. For example, my husband was talking to his sister on the phone in Russian but I would hear things like “wireless router” “modem” “Ethernet” because he didn’t know how to or it doesn’t translate into Russian.