Speak Ruby in Japanese

I’ve studied Japanese on and off for more than ten years – mostly “off.” I took a year of language when I was in college, but since then it’s just been periodic classes at Soko Gakuen in San Francisco.

I managed to pass the JLPT level 3 a few years ago, so in Japan last month, I was decent at ordering food and navigating the subway. But I quickly discovered that I couldn’t really talk to another programmer. None of my classes even taught me how to say “programmer,” let alone “code,” “object,” “method,” “development environment”…

Dictionaries would normally be my next recourse, but it’s pretty hard to look this stuff up. As in the US, programmer culture in Japan has its own slang. But I had a chance to pair with some Japanese devs at the Pair Programming Cultural Exchange that @t_wada and I ran at RubyKaigi (see left), so I picked up a little bit. And since I’ve been back, I’ve been translating technical articles for fun. (What else would you do on a 12-hour flight?)

As a result, a lot of this list comes from my notes. I also added words I found in the RubyKaigi Twitter stream, Sarah Allen’s blog, and Mightyverse’s pair programming phrases, among other locations. Any errors are, of course, my own.

The list is short – there are many more things I’d like to know how to say. And I guessed at the right katakana for some of the loan words. So: please send additions and corrections[*], kkthx! I’ll add anything vaguely technical to the list.

I hope it provokes more cross-language Ruby discussion.

English Kanji Kana Romaji block ブロック burokku blog ブログ burogu cache キャッシュ kyasshu character 文字 もじ moji code コード koudo core library コアライブラリ koa raiburari developer 開発者 かいはつしゃ kaihatsusha development 開発 かいはつ kaihatsu development environment 開発環境 かいはつかんきょう kaihatsu kankyou diary (often used in place of blog) 日記 にっき nikki digit 数字 すうじ suuji dot (as in foo.bar) ドット dotto expected failure (of a test) 予想通りの失敗 よそうどおりのしっぱい yosoudoori no shippai feature 機能 きのう kinou flexible 柔軟 じゅうなん juunan full-width (as in character) 全角 ぜんかく zenkaku global (as in variable) グローバル guroubaru hashrocket ハッシュロ ケット hasshuroketto implementation 実装 じっそう jissou internal structure 内部構造 ないぶこうぞう naibu kouzou latest 最新 さいしん saishin method (on an object) メソッド mesoddo modification 変更 へんこう henkou multibyte (as in character) 多バイト たバイト tabaito multibyte (as in character) マルチバイト maruchibaito object オブジェクト obujekuto plugin プラグイン puraguin programmer プローグラーマ purouguraama refactoring リファクタリング rifakutaringu refactoring 改善 かいぜん kaizen runtime ランタイム rantaimu spec スペック supekku statement ステートメント suteetomento string 文字列 もじれつ mojiretsu test テスト tesuto test framework テストフレームワーク tesuto fureemuwaaku threadsafe スレッドセーフ sureddoseefu tool ツール tsuuru tutorial チュートリアル chuutoriaru ugly (as in code) かっこ悪い かっこわるい kakko warui usage 使い つかい tsukai variable 変数 へんすう hensuu

[*] ありがとう: