OBOS Transformed Worldwide: Moldova

Tu Si Curpul Tau Pentru un Nou Secol: O carte despre si pentru femei

The following is the English translation of the preface from the Romanian edition of Our Bodies, Ourselves.

The Annotation to the Romanian issue of OBOS

The book which is written by a group of American women researches encyclopedically and effectively all the aspects of the woman’s life: the most important stages of the physical development, the physiology of the sexuality, the peculiarities of the heterosexual and homosexual relationship, methods and ways of contraception, the pregnancy, the child-bearing, diseases and possibilities of their prevention, the problems related to the period of the postmenopause and the old age. Also, they reflect the historical struggle of the women in USA for the gender equality.

The Romanian issue is substantially synthesized and adapted; they omitted some passages and images that are irrelevant for the realities of our country, as well as the whole bibliography, which can be consulted in the original version of the book.

Many thanks to the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, SOROS Foundation - Moldova, the National Women’s Studies and Information Center from Moldova, especially to Sally Whelan, Antonina Sârbu, Galina Precup for their special contribution to the publishing.

The medical institutions benefit by cuts in price.

Report narrative

In order to lead a really healthy and wealthy lifestyle, men and women should be, first of all, aware and well informed about what their body mean, which are the physiological and psychological peculiarities of the human organism, what it needs to be in a right and comfortable state etc. The lack of information (a really good and authentic information) is one of the most complex and frequent problem of our post-soviet Moldavian society that is still passing through a difficult period of transition. Women (almost the ones living in the rural area) who are not yet aware of their rights and opportunities are the first to become victims of their own ignorance, which doesn’t often depend on them. They are eager to learn more and more, but they have no possibilities and sufficient resources to consult.

Taking in account the crucial value of medical aspects of women’s informing and training, the importance of the personal prevention, when dealing with symptoms of every potential disease, the need and the usefulness of a book “for women and about them” is undoubted in a society that is “thirsty” of being informed. Women feel a vital necessity to have a genuine source, which is concomitantly a scientifically based one (containing true information and real data about their body), and a very simple one, written in a language accessible for common people. The idea to bring OBOS to our women was firstly based on this reason. Another point is that well thought and well-organized books are very rare here in Moldova; as to the existing ones, sometimes they are not available, because women don’t know about their publication.

The primary goal of our team, when working on the translation and adaptation of OBOS consisted in fitting it to our reality, in order to make the book really accessible and useful for the Moldavian women.

We tried to keep the authenticity of the book, but however, there were performed some modifications (not within the content, but in the structure of the original issue). In comparison with the English version, ours is more medically focused - when working on the adaptation and translation we “were playing” according to our society’s requests and needs. We didn’t want to sacrifice quality for quantity, by introducing information which will be not used by our national women (see the explanations below).

After a detailed examination of the original issue of the OBOS, the editor decided to omit some paragraphs describing problems, diseases, solutions proposed and realities that are not characteristic to our society, which is very different from the American one.

For making the book closer to our national reader, to make the women see themselves in the book, or at least, see an image similar to theirs, we excluded some photographs. As America is a multicultural country, there are women of different races and nationalities, and the images included in the original book highlights this variety. Thus, for the reason we mentioned above, we left in the Romanian version only the photos of white women who look like ours. As you see, the cover of the book was designed according our realities, including images of Moldovan women.

The English issue contains descriptions of some histories, events related by international women, and passages from acts and documents adopted in USA, as well. As to our version, they excluded some of them, which are specific enough to your American society and have no tangencies with ours.

Another change made - the exclusion of the chapter Introduction to Online Women’s Health Resources. Unfortunately, in Moldova, especially in the rural area, there are a very restrained number of women who can use or have a personal computer, and of such ones who possess abilities of navigating throughout Internet. This is the unique, but motivated reason of the fact we considered evident the futility of publishing this introduction.

After each chapter of English OBOS there are Notes and Resources to be used by interested women. It is great! The reader can get informed about various informative materials in the domain: books, periodicals, articles, audiovisual materials, programs, on-line resources etc., and if necessary, to consult them as additional info. All these resources are not available in our country, because they do not exist here! To our regret, we had to renounce publishing the final part of each chapter. But women who have larger possibilities (to use Internet, for example) can resort to the English issue, which is always accessible at NWSIC’s library. (Note: at the meeting focused on the books presentation, the general sponsor of the edition - SOROS Foundation - Moldova decided to offer gratis both OBOS and SOFL to each women’s NGO. For the moment, all organizations and individuals who have the books know about the existence of the original English issue in our Center, and have the opportunity to consult information excluded in the Romanian one.)

The last change operated - we omitted two final chapters: The Politics of Women and Health, and Organizing for change: U.S.A. The reason consists in the fact we prefer a book with a medically focused subject to a book with a political theme. That is why no problems and questions regarding the political orientation and choice arose, when working on synthesizing and adapting OBOS.

To our surprise and, of course, to our happiness we have no problems and difficulties when working on the translation and adaptation of the book. The publisher - who possesses the sense of responsibility - worked hard, and our collaboration was very pleasant and fruitful (the really pretty and elegant Romanian issue proves this fact, doesn’t it?).

As to the methods and techniques used in translation and adaptation of the book, they were not so special to be mentioned. The translator - she is a woman, too! - a good professional (she has already experience in translating literature on medical issues) did her best to come to such a brilliant final result. We consider that a big role in assuring a high quality to the translation of a specialized book (OBOS is one of them) is the rich experience in a given domain of the translator who is performing the work. More the translator knows about the subject he will be working on, more qualitative will be the translated variant of the book.

As we mentioned, every local and national women’s NGO from Moldova was given a book - this is one of the first steps in spreading information amongst women all over the country. The book is an unvalued tool in organizing trainings and seminars for women, in teaching schoolgirls physiological and psychological aspects of their body, in individual consulting and finding advice and possible solutions for troubles related to woman’s health, to special situations and diseases.

After the meeting of presentation of OBOS we arrived to the conclusion that it would be very useful to extend the content of the book by additional information regarding our Moldavian society and woman’s health condition. There were proposed two possible ways of performing this work: first, to add supplementary information to each chapter, second, to make a general appendix to the whole edition. There are a great variety of subjects to be developed in a future issue of our national OBOS - a book dedicated to every woman living in any Moldavian locality.

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