Burnout prevention: translating action guidelines for Italian humanitarian aid workers

Emergencies put humankind at risk, particularly when natural disasters (e.g. an earthquake) or armed conflicts (e.g. a civil war) are concerned. As a result, the necessity of providing guidelines to support humanitarian organizations and the individuals who put their efforts into helping a population in an emergency setting led to the publication of "Textbook of Global Mental Health: Trauma and Recovery, A Companion Guide for Field and Clinical Care of Traumatized People Worldwide" in 2011. The work is edited by Richard Mollica, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School (Boston, MA); it gathers and shares studies that several international researchers have conducted in the field, reporting traumatic experiences that occurred during the twentieth and the twenty-first century in regions such as Cambodia, Rwanda and Kosovo. The aim of this dissertation is to translate a chapter selected from the textbook, i.e. “Burnout among Humanitarian Aid Workers and Human Service Providers”. The text aims at preventing the onset of burnout through eight key steps, helping the medical staff to cope with the negative impact of an emergency setting. Thanks to the translation of the text from English into Italian, a series of guidelines will be made available to a possible Italian medical staff in case of traumatic events or emergencies like the 2016 earthquakes in central Italy. At the same time, the selected text may be employed to address issues related to a workplace during the COVID-19 pandemic. The dissertation first describes the reasons that brought me to analyse the text selected. Subsequently, because the chapter translated belongs to the genre of the scientific paper, this type of text is discussed to highlight its current features and online distribution. Burnout is then analysed on a medical level, referring to the origin of the concept put forward by American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in 1974. Finally, the last chapter describes Mollica’s efforts in the field, and analyses the linguistic features of the source text, the translation process and the target text in Italian.