“游牧”与“Nomades”关系辨识

On the Relationship between “YouMu” and “Nomades”

中文一般以"游牧"和"游牧民"对译英文中的nomadism和nomad。然而,池上二良、杉山正明和郭静云等学者认为,nomadism或nomad仅有"游"的意思,而无"畜牧"之意,从而主张选词翻译。在中国古文献中,游牧一词,词义清晰,既指移动性,又有畜牧之义,最初并不带有任何民族性的含义,只是因为异民族的生产生活方式恰好符合这个词的词义,才被贴上了民族的标签。以斯基泰人为例梳理相关古希腊文献,可以发现古希腊文nomades在具体语境中词义偏重有所不同,然其词义总体上仍是"游""牧"兼有,并非特指一端。综合考虑,目前以游牧来对译nomadism,以游牧民来对应翻译nomad是比较合适的。

Now in Chinese Literature, "Youmu" is translated into nomaddism and "Youmumin" is translated into nomad correspondingly. However, Nagara Ikegami, Sugiyama Masaaki and Olga Gorodetskaya argue that nomadism and nomad have the meaning of "wanders" only, but donnot have the meaning of raising livestock. They suggest choosing new words to translate them. Therefore we specially investigates "Youmu" in Chinese literature and "nomades" in ancient Greek literature. In Chinese ancient literature, "You"means moving and "Mu" means the rearing patterns of animals. At the beginning, "Youmu" contained no information of ethnic groups. Just because the foreign ethnic groups had the same life patterns, so "Youmu" was labeled as ethnic groups afterwards. Taking Scythians as an example in the process of investigating the ancient Greek literature, we find that nomades has different meanings in special contexts. However, the Nomades both has the meaning of moving and raising livestock in all the contexts. Therefore, it is appropriate to translate the nomadism into "Youmu" and nomad into "Youmumin" in Chinese.