The Introduction and Critical Analysis of Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation

The celebrated German sociologist, Norbert Elias, in his magnum opus, Uber den Prozess der Zivilisation, through a long-term social-historical analysis, recasts the processual configurations of manners since Renaissance, searching how the Europeans came to be known 'civilized.' A group of renowned scholars of Elias, then his editors of the English translation, edited the Edmund Jephcott’s fine translation in 1999, The Civilizing Process, and put the long introduction written by Elias thirty years after the first publication, in 1968, at the end of the edited version, as a Postscript. The Persian translation of The Civilizing Process appeared in 2018 by Qolam Reza Khadivi. We seek to do a contrastive analysis based on the Persian translation of the English version, whilst Khadivi claims he has translated from the original German text. The available Persian translation is incomplete since the preface, first volume, postscript, appendix, and most of the author’s notes have not been translated yet. As our scrutiny shows, the Persian translation of The Civilizing Process has so many formal problems, it lacks consistency and does not pursue a good norm of wordage, in addition to numerous written and editorial mistakes.