Traduzione, commento e analisi stilistica di ''Medical Care of Cancer Patients''

1. Approaching the Language of Science Scientists use language. It could be said in order to define this statement further, that the language they use serves a wide variety of ends: they use it to communicate among themselves, to scribble notes, to rearrange the findings of their research into articles and to write textbooks for those students who will be tomorrow‘s scientists. This should be kept in mind and should lead to realise that there are nearly endless sub-varieties which differ in audiences and participants, purposes and degrees of complexity (Darian 2003:ix). Each one of these activities is nevertheless social in nature, since science – as all other human activities – is inherently social (Reeves 2005:1). Scientific productivity relies on collaboration among scientists and collaboration would hardly be achievable without oral and written language. It can now be safely argued that language is as central to science as it is to other realms, such as poetry and courtship, politics and business. But grasping the key role played by language in the making of science represents a starting point, not a conclusion. The four items listed above were not randomly chosen: poetry, courtship, politics and business are well known for the biased and arbitrary language they use: could the same thing be said about the language of science? Unfortunately, this question is not a yes-no one: the language of science – being language – is doomed to show some degree of imperfection, there being no perfect way to communicate what goes on under the microscope, in a diseased body or in a galaxy far away (Reeves 2005:2). This is not a paralysing limit, though: scientists are interested in finding out what can be generally said to be true under most conditions and therefore their language deals with capturing what is most generally observable and predictable (Reeves 2005:5). One way of approaching the language of science is to contrast it with the language of poetry, since such a comparison would bring out the key features of 3