A huge table presenting the words for chess, check, and each chess piece in 59 languages can be found here:

http://www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Metro/9154/nap-pieces.htm

The meaning of rook is explained there as coming from the Sanskrit word ratha (chariot) which through Persian and Arabic became rukh. It is also noted that the only language other than English to use a direct transliteration of this word is Icelandic, with hrókur

Interestingly, while Russian uses the word Slon (meaning elephant as noted in dimroed's writeup) for the Bishop, the only other Slavic languages in the table that also use this word appear to be Belorussian and Ukranian. From what I can see, the remaining Slavic languages use:

Hunter

• Croatian: lovac
• Macedonian: lovec (ловец)
• Serbian: lovac (ловац)

Marksman

• Czech: střelec
• Slovak: strelec

Other

• Polish uses goniec which seems to translate to runner--like Hebrew as noted by jonmos.


• Slovenian uses tekač, which I haven't been able to find a translation for, but I suspect means either hunter or marksman given the language's general closeness to Slovak and Croatian.


• I'm pretty sure that the Bulgarian word transliterated in the table as ofitser (офицер) means officer as dimroed's grandmother suggests the bishop may have been called occasionally in Russian. According to the footnotes on the page, the Bishop is also called "frits" colloquially in Bulgaria, which is what they used to call German soldiers (derived from the name Fritz, of course).

By the way, the table lists the word dama as the Croatian term for the Queen, but in my experience the word kraljica (queen) is much more common. I think that dama is used only in Croatian chess notation to avoid confusion with the word kralj (king), since it already uses the letter 'K'.

As for the etymology of the word chess, I've found at least two pages that seem to confirm the suggestions above. Namely, chess comes from shah, the Persian word for king, and shah mat means "the king is dead".

rischi says:

"shah" and "mat" are also the words used in hindi/urdu while playing chess respectively for "check" and "mate". "mat" doesn't mean death, however, it means "defeat", "maut" means "death".