In German, the work was published as Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, which translates as "The Uneasiness (or, the Malaise) in Culture." By swapping those two key terms, Civilization for Culture and Discontents for Uneasiness, the English translation seems to lend the work a sense of refinement and delicacy that is not present in the original German. To take the most obvious example from Civilization and Its Discontents, consider the title. Similarly, Freud's concepts and metaphors have often been tweaked in translation. This removes the concepts from our everyday experience: we often talk about what "I" did today, but never about what "Ego" did today. Nearly all translations of Freud, however, translate these three terms as the Ego, the Id and the Super-Ego. In German, this model is divided into the "Ich" ("I"), the "Es" ("It") and the "Uber-Ich" ("Over-I"). A famous example can be found in Freud's model of the self. Freud's language has tended to be translated into English as more "clinical" and scientific-sounding than the original German. Among scholars of Freud, the question of translation is a perennial subject of debate.
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