To give an example: a mouse click was supposed to be called a "mlask", which directly translates to "a smack of the lips".
Needless to say that didn't stick and nowadays only veteran programmers are even aware that such an attempt was made.
- čigrasto pamtilo "peg-top-like memorizer" for a floppy disk
- čigrasto velepamtilo "peg-top-like big memorizer" for a hard disk
- stolno potezalo - "tabletop pull-arounder" for a mouse
After a while, nobody was certain what was a real term and what was a joke one, so most of it is abandoned now and mostly English terms are used.
Our expression for "mouse" was quite byzantine: "manipulator stołowo-kulotoczny" (table sphererolling manipulator?). This just begs for a TLA like "MSK".
Squirrel was chosen because it is considered cute, but mouse is considered dirty. I think that kind of consideration of association is important in translation.
That's a great example of the difference between translation and localization.
The worst part about those calques are their lack of brevity.
In Korea "to click" is translated as "to press". Now, that wasn't difficult, was it?
Then again some words, like "sterownik"(can be understood as "someone who steers" - driver) remain in use to this day.
E.g., in early 90's, some people tried to use daramjwi (literally, "squirrel") for mouse. I'm not sure what they were thinking - a (computer) mouse doesn't look like a squirrel at all.
The term didn't survive.
Even worse offender was the Hercules graphics card, which was widely popular at that time. I think the same group of people tried to "translate" it into cheonha jangsa (something like "the strongest man on earth") - because, you know, Hercules the son of Zeus was known to be the strongest man on earth! (Never mind Hercules was a brand name here.)