Of those areas of linguistics which have given greatest impetus to the developing science, translation and particularly the problems of machine translation have been most influential and have provided the most significant insights into the nature of language. Since the quest for language and the reexamination of semantics emerging from this study of language have brought added dimensions to the understanding of language, the author deems it appropriate to ask whether anything of practical value to the translator is to be found here. The two most important advances lie in the confirmation of the fact that all language is structed (i.e. rule governed) and in the efforts to produce a grammar that will predict all sentences which can occur in a language (generative grammar). This approach offers a universal observation of the structure of language, thus making it possible to derive rules for the transposition of the structure of one language to that of another.