As far as I can tell, he really did a great and serious job.

I admire that he noted the pronunciation ju1 for the character 車 (the cart, a piece of the original xiangqi 象棋, aka "Chinese chess"), which reads that way only when it means the chess piece (it is che1 otherwise; many sinophone foreigners don't know the special "chess reading").

Some notes, probably insignificant.
In Russian, ferz' is sometimes called "koroleva" (f.ex., my dad found this use in Grossmeister Alehin's book published in 1924)[queen].
Slon is also called "officer" [bishop], which sort of corresponds to the "flagbearer" and "leader on the battlefield" in other languages.
Peshka has same-root connections with words "peshij" (on foot-adj.) and "pekhota' (foot soldiers)[pawn]. I am not sure of Ukranian "pishak" being another word for farmer, I'd rather suggest the same logic as in Russian - translation from Arabic.

Note that all the Japanese words he lists are just straight borrowings of the English words. I presume this is because they were borrowed at the same time chess was (and from an English-speaking country).

But Japan (and China, and probably other places in Asia) also have their own game which is derived from the same roots as chess: 将棋, shougi. This page has a frighteningly comprehensive list of shougi vocab:

http://www.shogi.net/shogivocab/

You can probably guess which piece is which -- the 飛車, "flying chariot", is equivalent to the rook -- but there are some variants reflecting the differing evolution of the two games (the 香車,"fragrant chariot" or usually "lance" in English, is like a rook except it can't move sideways until it is promoted).

Here's a page explaining the pieces and rules a little more:

http://www.chessvariants.com/shogi.html

Thanks, that's a great supplement! Here's a direct link to the vocabulary site. When I lived in Japan I tried to learn shogi but it was too confusing, since I was still trying to master chess.

Tatyana: I hope Mr. Luiro sees your additions; I'm sure he'd want to add them to the list.

Matt,

The Chinese version is called xiangqi 象棋 ("boardgame of the elephant", usually called "Chinese chess" in the West).

The pieces and the board are quite different from shogi's (game of the General), as, I assume, are the rules (I never played anything else than xiangqi, and never learned successfully the rules of Western chess).
In xiangqi, some pieces have different names depending on their side: the General (jiang 将) is opposed to a Marshall (shuai 帅), the two Elephants to the Ministers 相 (both are 'xiang'), one side's 'bing' 兵 (soldiers) are the other side's 'zu' 卒; the canons 'pao' and the officers 'shi' are usually written with variants (炮 can be written with the 'stone' radical instead of 'fire', and 士 with the 'person' radical added on the left).

As Luiro rightly notes, Western chess is called "international (guoji) xiangqi" in Chinese. Sounds a bit better than "Orthodox Chess", which I saw used on the otherwise very informative chessvariants.org page.

I checked, but did not see Quechua chess terms. Back when I was housing six illegal Bolivians I was learning Quechua. These guys were from Cochabamba, where pretty much everyone is bilingual, but chess was always played in Quechua. The King was, of course, the Inca, and the pawns were walpi (chickens).

The rook (lad'ja) is sometimes called turA in Russian, apparently from la tour. This seems to explain the Chuvash term.

You might appreciate the (very basic) article I wrote for the Latin wikipedia: http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scacci