Multilingual Go Book Project

What is the  Multilingual Go Book Project

As the name implies, the goal of the project is to have a Go book that will be
translated to as many languages as possible, in order to promote and spread Go
in countries that do not have a Go tradition and the native language is not
English.

The project came to be due to the difficulties of promoting Go in my home
country, Greece. We didn’t have educational material in our language and there
were young people and adults that wanted to learn the game, but could not read
English. This meant that the vast majority of educational material (e.g books,
wikis, youtube lectures) were out of their reach and we had try and teach each
person individually. Not only was such a thing counter-productive, but it was
also tiring for the people that wanted to learn the game, since they had
nothing to take home with them and study and have some fun. The promotion of Go
was on the level of “word of mouth” all because of a linguistic barrier, so I
realised that we needed educational material. We needed something that students
could read, something that we could give to people that had never heard of the
game. We needed a book in our language.

But Europe is a vast continent with many countries and languages, so maybe
other countries have a similar problem with Greece. I realised that possibility
by participating in the European Go Championship and noticing that some
countries around our division and our region didn’t have too many young players
in them either. So, maybe they need a book in their language as well. Something
that could circulate in libraries, schools, universities and game shops. Places
where young people with a passion for board games might be found. So, why
should we stop at only in English and Greek? We should make the book in more
languages and have it be free for everyone.

The book was published in 2018 and its title is A Go Guide From a Beginner. It was written by Charalampos (Haris) Kapolos. He wrote it in English first and then he translated it into his native language, Greek.

It has been fully translated into Catalan, French, Portuguese (Brazilian) and Spanish, and partially into Danish, German, Italian, Mongolian, Polish, Russian, and Serbian.