From: Pieter Stouten <stoutepf <at> CHEMSCI5 <dot> dmpc <dot> com>
Date: 13 oct 1995
Subject: Japanese or English names (was: Notation of position and score?)

At 17:47 95/10/12, Taki Naruta (tn <at> panix <dot> com) wrote:

>> Though each name from chess is not so familiar for most Japanese
>> people, I feel these English names are natural.
>
>They do sound natural to me now, but they didn't when I first
>heard about them, and even today I don't particularly like the
>use of chess term/notation when simple Japanese terms are
>available.
>
The funny thing is that Dutch Shogi players use a mixture of Japanese,
English and some Dutch terms. In most cases, the English terms could easily
be translated into Dutch and, indeed, Dutch Chess players use the Dutch
equivalent. For example, Dutch Shogi players often talk about "rook"
(hisha) rather than the Dutch equivalent "toren," while Dutch Chess players
would tend to use the latter.

Although George Hodges and John Fairbairn have made attempts to translate
all relevant Japanese terms into English, there was a strong tendency to
use Japanese terms when the translation did not seem intuitively better.
All the Shogi castles are generally referred to by their Japanese names:
yagura (fortress), mino, anaguma (bear-in-the-hole), probably because
giving them an English name does not give much of a clue about their shape
(apart from bear-in-the-hole maybe, but that is just too long an
expression). Concepts such as joseki and tesuji are not often translated
because translation fails or leads to long, awkward description. For
example, translating "tesuji" to "combination" does not cover the concept
entirely. On the other hand, an expression like "ranging rook" (furibisha)
does convey a very clear impression of what the rook is doing, and in these
cases western players may opt to use the translation rather than the
Japanese original.

I guess that everybody uses pretty much what they feel comfortable with. So
far I have not observed a tendency to standardize.

Cheers, Pieter.

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Pieter Stouten                              ||  Nothing shocks me;
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