There are a lot of interesting problems in surface chemistry where quantum chemistry could give great insight, like reaction mechanisms in heterogeneous catalysis, the effect of surface functionalization on semiconductors, or the influence of defects on the reactivity of crystal surfaces. Plane wave based methods applied to crystals cannot handle problems that are localized in nature like surface defects and adsorbates. On the other hand, molecular electronic structure techniques, which describe these effects and the locality of the electronic correlation well, are too computationally expensive to use on these systems. In this work, we introduce translationally-transformed coupled-cluster (TT-CC) theory, a new electronic structure method that incorporates the periodicity of crystals and the locality of electronic correlation. This is accomplished by encoding the periodicity into the amplitudes, instead of using plane waves, in order to be able to use a local basis to reflect the decay of the electronic correlation at sufficiently large distances. This avoids the calculation of redundant amplitudes. Perfectly periodic surfaces are envisioned as reference wavefunctions for localized defects and chemical reactions. The working equations in one dimension are derived starting from the amplitude equations of conventional coupled cluster singles and doubles (CCSD) on an infinite system and rearranging them such that the distance to an anonymous cell is an explicit degree of freedom, L. The formally infinite summations can be truncated by systematically neglecting numerically insignificant amplitudes. The generalization of the amplitude equations to higher dimensions is straightforward, albeit laborious. We show a general strategy to incorporate defects. These will be subjects of future dissertations. We present a proof of principle for 1-dimensional chemical systems of increasing size (He, H2, Be, Ne and N2) using the 6-31G basis set. We compute the energies, with TT-CCSD, at different distances and compared them against the perfectly periodic intensive energy (PPIE) using conventional CCSD. All results, up to L=3, show that the energies of TT-CCSD converge to the PPIE. For neon, TT-CCSD shows an error of -6.2x10-6 Eh per cell against the PPIE at the bonding distance with the potential computational cost of 7 cells using CCSD, as an upper bound. For nitrogen, TT-CCSD shows an error of -2.2x10-9 Eh at 7.5 Å per cell with the same potential cost as upper bound.