The Application of Chomsky’s Syntactic Theory in Translation Study

Abstract

Noam Chomsky is a famous American linguist. Since he put forward his Transformational-generative Grammar (TG), many scholars have tried to use the concepts of deep structure (D-structure) and surface structure (S-structure) to provide a theoretical basis for translation studies. It is true that the theory of D-/ S-structure is of great importance in analyzing the syntactic structure of sentences in source language and target language. However, in the author's opinion, the function of D-/ S-structure cannot be exaggerated in translation study as translation is not just a syntactic process but a combination of many aspects.