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”…

@sarahmei, @t_wada, @sakuro (photo by Lee Lundrigan)

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.

[*] ありがとう:

• @threedaymonk for a correction to multibyte digit.
• Nobuyoshi Nakada for corrections to variable and multibyte character/digit, and addition of full-width character/digit.
• @boblet and karmag for a correction to development environment.

I’ve been working on a side project that deals with Japanese text in Ruby. I installed rtranslate, a gem that gives me programmatic access to Google Translate. I wanted to try it out in irb.

>> require 'rtranslate'
=> true

So far so good.

>> Translate.t("

Here’s where I started to run into problems. I changed the input mode to Japanese and tried to enter はい (hai). All I got was beeping – irb wouldn’t let me enter any Japanese characters at all. I tried pasting from somewhere else – also a no go.

Long story short: by default, Ruby links against editline instead of GNU readline, and editline doesn’t support multi-byte characters. If I started irb with the –noreadline option, it worked fine, but then none of the arrow keys worked. Highly annoying.

I read five different articles [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] that fixed variants of the problem; none of the solutions worked fully for me. My machine is running Snow Leopard, and I had installed Ruby 1.8.7 from source following the Hivelogic directions. So if you’re in the same boat, here’s how you get multi-byte input working:

1. Install GNU readline.

cd ~/src
curl -O ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-6.0.tar.gz
tar xzvf readline-6.0.tar.gz
cd readline-6.0
./configure --prefix=/usr/local
make
sudo make install


The –prefix in the configure line is crucial.

2. Recompile Ruby, pointing at the new readline. I still had the Ruby source directory in ~/src from when I compiled it the first time (this is a relatively new laptop). If you don’t, you can just download it again.

cd ~/src
curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p174.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.7-p174.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.7-p174
make clean
autoconf
./configure --enable-shared --with-readline-dir=/usr/local
make
sudo make install


3. My profile had gotten out of whack, so I had to add this line (again) to ~/.bash_profile:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH


Now I can enter multi-byte characters into irb, or copy them in from elsewhere. Now I can get on with what I was actually going to do.

>> require "rtranslate"
=> true
>> Translate.t("はい", "JAPANESE", "ENGLISH")
=> "Yes"