Abstract
This paper aims at identifying aspects of disharmony between semantic and syntactic features that result in meaningless medical translated sentences. A special focus is given to Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Theory (T.G. Grammar) that extrapolates the correlation between deep structure (which determines the semantic features of a sentence) and the surface structure (which determines the syntactic structure of a sentence), putting in consideration the importance of achieving harmony between meaning and structure to produce meaningful and accurate translation of the source text (ST) resulting in an acceptable final product (target Text). The investigation of this study also relies on the concept of ‘Selectional Restrictions’ which suggests that certain sets of verbs stand with agreement with certain sets of subjects/objects that subsequently lead to the production of semantically acceptable sentences. Accordingly, it is imperative to touch upon aspects related to the Componential Analysis Theory where the meaning of a word is expressed with the assistance of (+) and (-) markers. I consider this study to be unique and innovative as it applies such prominent semantic theories, for the first time, with the craft of translation, offering real concrete examples extracted from practical translation tasks performed by students of Translation Dept., Faculty of Languages- University of Tripoli. Worth mentioning, that a piece of a translation is proved to be correct when semantic/syntactic harmony is achieved and where the message of the source text (ST) is being effectively communicated in the target text (TT). On the contrary, any disharmony between deep/surface structures found would seriously undermine the quality and correctness of a translation product. Key Words: Source Text (ST) - Target Text (TT) – Deep Structure – Surface structure - Selectional restrictions arabic 11 English 73