Caissus: Sorry, didn't know that. I'm rather new to all this chessvariants. Didn't even know that there are so many! Well, looks like I'm not the only one who mixed that up:
http://www.chessvariants.org/large.dir/janus.html
"The extra pieces of this game, the Januses, look like knights with some extra `pin' put on their head, making them look a little like unicorns."

Uwe, I would have a questions for you just to satisfy my own interest. Who came up with standards like this Janus-look? Is there somethink like a Janus Chess Federation in place? Can you link me to some 'History of Janus Chess'?

Thanks,

Gotti

Caissus: That's an Einhorn (unicorn)!
http://homepages.compuserve.de/uwdacoma/JanusMarsh1.jpg

If you need names for E and Z then
Erzengel and Zentaur sounds good to me. Erzengel because of the reasons given by Sumerian (defending the paradise's entry by his sword) and Zentaur because of the half-horse thingy! However I'm by far not the person to establish German standards for GC this should be done officially by the Austrian and German GothicChess Federation. So I'm just doing some brainstorming here.

andreas: Nice idea but all existing German notations are derived off the first letter of the piece name. I'm not an expert in chess history to find the reason for this but I think we should comply in some way with the traditional system. At the moment this is not an issue as there are no official German Tournaments running and to be honest in traditional chess I'm more familiar with the English notation than the German anyway. Ideal would be piece names having 'A' and 'C' as their first letter I think. This would satisfy everyone I guess except professional translators of course :-)

schachmdmt: I was thinking over the translation again. It's not that easy to resolve. You are right that for some historical reason German notation takes its abbreviations off the first letter of the official german name of pieces where in English they don't by the way (eg. kNight). Literal translation doesn't seem the best approach to comply with the current piece naming. It's more a search for names which have a unique first letter (eg. Queen vs Dame [=Lady] instead of Königin [lit. translation]).
So 'Erzbischof' for Archbishop seems to be ok. But I can't find a proper translation for the Chancellor having using this thesis. Kanzler would violate with King. Präsident would be nice but having a President and a King at the same board doesn't look that good. There must be a better term. Probably our German colleagues could help us out here ...

schachmdmt: Nice look. Viennse dialect would be cool though ;-) One spelling mistake I found was: 'Arcbishop' instead of Archbishop.
By the way does anybody know the correct translation of an Archbishop. Is it 'Erzbischof' or 'Kardinal'. I think different confessions have different definitions of those. Anyway, Chancellor would be 'Kanzler', no doubt.

Markus, do you know of any Austrians playing GC besides you and me?

Gotti