Published Belarusian Go Dictionary
I have compiled and published a Belarusian dictionary of terms and concepts for the cool board strategy game - Go!
The title of the post and the phrase above generally speak for themselves, and you can find a link to the dictionary itself at the bottom of this page. But I would like to provide a little background - how I generally came to this.
Back in early 2020, with the spread of the coronavirus and the lockdown, I became interested in playing Go. At first, I just mindlessly played on various online servers, not caring about improving my playing skills. But after a while, I wanted to play better and I began to figure out what opportunities there are for this. Although the basic rules of the game are quite simple and can be understood in 5 minutes if you want to study the technique and philosophy of the game in more depth, you have to deal with a lot of terms and concepts. So I started watching various educational videos, reading books about strategies and techniques of the game, and even got to know go players in Minsk, where I was then living, and met with them from time to time to play together and develop my skills.
Even then, I was puzzled by the large number of terms used by the players. Many of these terms are of Japanese origin. Since I didn’t know Japanese, I made up a simple hint sheet in Russian for myself. In the spring of 2022, I posted it on this blog for public use, where it can still be found.
In parallel with all this, many changes took place in my life, many of which are related to the political, social, and cultural crisis in Belarus. One of the results of these changes was that I started localizing one of the world’s largest and most popular online Go servers into Belarusian. You can read more about this in a separate post. During working on this localization, I had a lot of questions about how to correctly translate certain terms into Belarusian. As a result, I realized that I needed a dictionary of terms that I could use as a base. Also, I thought maybe it could be useful to all other Belarusian-speaking fans of this game (although, unfortunately, I have not met such people yet). In the end, I made this dictionary!
The basis for it was my old original Russian-language hint sheet. But in the future, I plan to maintain, correct, develop and extend only the Belarusian version. It’s a little funny to think that if I spent all this time directly on the game, then my playing skill could be much higher 🤡
In any case, I’m glad that I’m doing this, perhaps it will help to grow the popularity of the Go game among Belarusians (and maybe not only among them).
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