Chomskian deep structure and translation

Abstract

This article examines attempts by certain Chinese scholars’ to apply transformational grammar to the explanation of translation practice. Specific attention is given to the use of ‘deep structure’ in such attempts. It is argued that, although most of these scholars claimed that they were applying Chomsky's transformational grammar to translation studies, none of them used the notion ‘deep structure’ in the Chomskian sense. It is further pointed out that transformational grammar is a sentence grammar aimed at describing language competence while translation falls into the category of language performance. Therefore there are limitations in the applicability of transformational grammar to the description of translation practice. It is also argued that it is far from plausible at the present stage of transformational grammar development to design even a transformational grammar model of language transference since there is no adequate transformational grammar model of the English language, let alone of Chinese. It is more difficult to construct a translational model in the transformational grammar framework since we have to solve the problem of how to match the two separate grammars and how to design a system that can explain syntactic borrowing that often occurs in translation and language contact.