PHRASAL LOAN TRANSLATION TERMS IN THE MASTER’S THESES ON TEACHING TURKISH AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

Languages are living creatures. They need to feed on lexical units to survive. To satisfy this biological need, they either utilize their own properties to produce novel lexical units like plants photosynthesize or import foreign words to meet calorie deficit like animals feed. Loan translation is the combination of these two tendencies. During this process, a language benefits from its own words to find an equivalence to a novel concept; however, imitating a foreign source word in lexical, phrasal, or sentential level. This method is also used for special languages of terminological domains. For these realities, phrasal loan translation terminologization method was decided on as the data type. Turkish master’s theses on teaching Turkish as a foreign language were selected as the sample. 25 theses were scanned, and 203 potential phrasal loan translation terms were detected. Related terms were classified under six domains: education, linguistics, sociology, methodology, statistics, and others. Potential source languages and terms were represented for each term. If possible, they were provided with evidential source texts. Problematic terms were handled separately, and the potential reasons for these problems were explained just under the related term in the table. In the conclusion part, potential solution suggestions were presented.