EVD - The Ebola Virus Disease, una traduzione medica

5 INTRODUCTION Since December 2013, the world had been kept dangling in fear and concern about a new threat called The Ebola Virus Disease. Most of the cases erupted in the African continent but even United States and Europe were touched by the terrifying virus which seemed to reserve an agonizing death for those who happened to come across it. Moreover, media such as newspapers and television helped spread fear within our homes and lives. I decided to deepen and study the Ebola Virus Disease both because in my future I hope to see myself as a translator specialized in medical studies and because it makes me think about all the people who step up to help the healing process for populations and territories stroke by one the most fearful viruses of the last decade. Non-profit and humanitarian organizations such as Unicef and Doctors Without Borders were in the front line to assist those who got sick, even if the risk was incredibly high. Finally, I decided to deal with this theme to commemorate all the victims of this terrible virus that hit not only the African Continent but almost the entire world. The thesis begin with a brief biography of the writer who wrote the book I translated: David Quammen. The author is a great writer – even if he is not much known in Italy. “Ebola – the natural and human history of a deadly virus” like many others of his books, required a great work and not only in writing, but also in uncomfortable and dangerous travelling to the remotest corners of the Earth. Then, I wrote an introduction about the Ebola Virus Disease and the Megatransect, the expedition to which Quammen participated as a journalist for National Geographic. After all these information, essential to approach the translation, I plunged into medical terminology. First of all I dealt with the translation of “Ebola – the natural and human history of a deadly virus”, which I can define as a science and medical text telling a very interesting and frightening story. The translation also gave me the opportunity to begin using CAT tools in a more. I was able to use Wordfast thanks to my Passive Translation lessons, where the Professor taught me how to approach it. Because of its medical terminology, the translation is accompanied by a glossary containing not only the medical terminology of the translated part of the book, but of the entire text. This choice was made because of the great quantity of terms which I had to describe considering their importance in the understanding of the whole book. The glossary is divided in: English terms (accompanied by the etymology of the words), Italian translation and description of the terms in Italian. The choice to explain the terms in Italian was made to be coherent with the translation from the foreign language to mine. Finally, instead of an analysis of the translation with personal comments, which I didn’t consider useful for such a kind of text, I decided to insert a brief research about specialized translation in particular about medical one.