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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.
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DA VID QUAMMEN
La vita
David Quammen nasce nel 1948 e cresce nella periferia
di Cincinnati molto vicino a una foresta, dove trascorse la
maggior parte della sua adolescenza prima che i bulldozer
la spazzassero via. Nel 1973, dopo gli anni trascorsi a Yale
e a Oxford e in seguito alla pubblicazione di un romanzo, si
trasferisce in Montana, inizialmente senza prevedere che vi
avrebbe trascorso il resto della vita. Nel 1983 pubblica il
secondo libro, un romanzo di spionaggio. Mantiene il
medesimo genere anche per il terzo libro, The Soul of Viktor Tronko, basato su eventi storici, in
particolare sulla storia di un disertore russo. Il libro viene pubblicato da Doubleday nel 1987 ma non
ebbe molto successo: l’autore sostiene che “affondò come una rivoltella bollente gettata nel fiume
Potomac”. L’anno seguente, Graywolf pubblica il quarto libro di Quammen: Blood Line. Nel
frattempo, Quammen abbandona la scrittura narrativa. Alcune sezioni delle sue rubriche, assieme ad
alcuni articoli più approfonditi scritti per
Outside e altre riviste, costituiscono i
quattro seguenti libri scritti da Quammen:
Natural Acts (1985), The Flight of the
Iguana (1988), Wild Thoughts from Wild
Places (1998) e The Boilerplate Rhino
(2000). Una versione rivisitata, ristudiata e
modificata di Natural Acts viene pubblicata
nel 2008 da W.W. Norton. Dopo aver
abbandonato la narrativa scrive altri quattro
libri: The Song of the Dodo (1996), Monster of God (2003), The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006),
e Spillover (2012, di cui The Ebola Virus Disease è un estratto). Spillover arriva tra i finalisti di sette
premi e ne riceve due: il Science and Society Book Award, dell’Associazione Nazionale Scrittori
Scientifici e il Society of Biology Book Award in Biologia Generale.
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Nel 1999 il National Geographic commissiona a Quammen una serie di tre storie a proposito di J.
Michael Fay e della sua escursione di rilevamento lunga 320 km attraverso la foresta centrafricana:
il Megatransect. Quammen racconta di aver camminato per otto settimane con Fay lungo i bacini di
alcune zone del Congo e dell’Ogooué, principale fiume del Gabon. Una volta rientrato a casa,
Quammen continua a lavorare per il National Geographic e oggi vi lavora come collaboratore esterno
in qualità di scrittore. Nel 2004 scrive l’articolo
di copertina “Was Darwing Wrong?”, che gli
permette di aggiudicarsi il terzo National
Magazine Award. Nell’agosto 2013 il National
Geographic riporta due delle sue storie sul Leone
Africano: la prima è “The Short Happy Life of a
Serengeti Lion”, “La breve vita felice di un leone
di Serengreti”, scritto in collaborazione con un
fotografo, Michael “Nick” Nichols (suo partner
anche durante la spedizione Megatranset); la seconda storia, raccontata in un articolo a proposito del
conflitto uomo-leone, contiene foto di Brent Stirton.
Quammen riceve dottorati onorari da parte dell’Università del Montana e del College del
Colorado. Oltre a ottenere aiuto concreto durante il proprio percorso educativo e durante gli anni da
freelance, ottiene una borsa di studio Rhodes, una Gugghenheim fellowship, e un Premio Letterario
Lannan. Dal 2007 al 2009 lavora come professore presso la cattedra dedicata a Wallace Stegner
(impiego occasionale a rotazione della durata di tre anni), tenendo un corso di studi sull’America
Occidentale presso l’Università del Montana.
Oggi, continua a vivere a Bozeman con sua moglie Betsy Gaines Quammen, i suoi cani e i suoi
gatti. Dopo aver lasciato il kayak su acqua dolce e l’hockey sul ghiaccio, distrazioni riservata alla sua
mezza età che definisce impulsiva, si diletta oggi nel ciclismo e nello sci. Passa molto tempo coi suoi
cani, portandoli a spasso.
Dal 2013 lavora a un libro a proposito della filogenetica molecolare e dell’Albero della Vita.
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THE EBOLA VIRUS DISEASE
Ebola is an extremely aggressive virus belonging to the Filoviridae family. It causes a series of
complex symptoms that differ from muscle and other limbs pain to lots of problems in the central
nervous system. It can cause fever, headache, diarrhea, vomit, abdominal pain and hemorrhages. Until
now, researchers have localized five types of Ebola virus: Bundibugyo, Côte d’Ivoire, Reston, Sudan
e Zaire. The most dangerous types are Bundibugyo, Sudan and Zaire that caused epidemic having a
high mortality rate and spreading mostly in West Africa, while the others are less dangerous. The last
epidemic is the most famous one and has terrorized the world since the end of 2013. It crossed not
only countries borders, but also continents: from Africa to USA and Europe.
Everything began as a first great documented epidemic of Ebola virus disease in the Western
Africa, especially in Sudan and in Zaire. The first reported cases were in the forest region of the South
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East Guinea, near the border between Liberia and Sierra Leone. It was not a non-expected event,
knowing the ecosystem of the region was similar to the one of the other regions where Ebola appeared
in the past. It was the greatest Ebola epidemic: for the amount of the cases and for the reported death.
It spread firstly in the inner cities where the population is dense, like capital cities Freetown, Conakry
and Monrovia.
The origin is still unknown, but the first cases are supposed to have been in contact whit bush
meat. Most of the sick people participated to funerary ceremonies, strictly near sick deceased patients
and/or infected people. Believes and traditions – which are frequently against personal prevention
and public health – had been declared one of the most important causes of the disease spreading.
Frequent displacements and the difficulty in the implementation of safety measures facilitated the
propagation of the virus. But this last outbreak was not the first, it was only the worst.
In 1976 the Ebola Virus Disease first appeared in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in Sudan,
and it was already merciless in those days. The victims in both countries totalled 331 and the reported
cases were 600. No one knew anything about the virus until blood samples arrived to a Belgian
laboratory: it was the blood of a nun who got sick of a mysterious fever at Kinshasa. After many
studies, the microbiologist Peter Piot deduced the analysed virus was not the Marburg virus (which
also cause high haemorrhagic fever), but a more dangerous one. Piot and his colleagues decided to
call it Ebola, from the name of the valley where the nun came from. In 1976 the virus appeared in
one of its five types in Congo, the Zaire Ebola virus (88% rate of mortality), and in another in Sudan,
the Sudan Ebola virus (mortality rate 53%). The third strain of Ebola, Ebola Reston, was first
identified in 1989 when infected monkeys were imported into Reston, Virginia, from Mindanao in
the Philippines. Fortunately, the few people who were infected with Ebola Reston never developed
Ebola haemorrhagic fever.
Then the Ebola Cote d'Ivoire
virus was discovered in 1994,
when a female ethologist
performing a necropsy on a
dead chimpanzee from the
Tai Forest, Cote d'Ivoire,
accidentally infected herself
during the necropsy. The
patient was treated in
Switzerland and survived.
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