A Critique on the Translation of the Book “Inequality Reexamined”

Inequality Reexamined is a 1992 book by Amartya Sen. In the book Sen evaluates different approaches to inequality, focusing mainly on his well-known capability approach and notes that the real equality of opportunities is possible only through equality of capabilities (or the elimination of unambiguous inequalities in capabilities). The author also argues that since inequality is a central notion to all contemporary social theories; therefore, instead of discussing ‘Why equality?’ the engaging question should turn out to be “equality of what?’ Since the book was translated to Persian language by Azita Golzadeh Geshlaghchaie and Parviz Ghasemi and published by Islamic Parliament Research Center of The Islamic Republic of Iran in 2015, the purpose of this paper is to assess the translation. Based on this criticism, it can be concluded that although the translation is well-written, it is faced many difficulties in the process of translation. It is not also an appropriate one communicatively and semantically because of the errors which were made.