Forum: Ruby-core Helping Japanese-speaking Ruby hackers with English

Hey folks,
Dear ruby-core,

Many of the main contributors to Ruby are Japanese, and I truly
appreciate the great work you're doing for Ruby! Many like to complain
about MRI, but few actually does something about it. However, this
also causes some communication problems. To quote ko1 on IRC:
"[English is a] big problem for me :("

I feel like we can do better, and I want to help out:


If any Japanese-speaking Ruby hackers need help to understand some
English sentences, I'm going to be available:

  IRC: #ruby-core @ irc.freenode.net — I'm usually there UTC 09:00—15:00

  Email: judofyr@gmail.com — Use "[ruby]" as subject

I *don't* know any Japanese (other than ichi = 1, thanks to ko1), so
any questions have to be in English.


What do you think? Would this help? If not, are there other things we
can do to help?

(Maybe someone could mention this in ruby-dev?)

// Magnus Holm

I'm just thinking out loud here but I think a good start would be some
list with common Japanese <-> English translations along with a small
description about how the words/sentences are constructed. I'd say the
big problem is not just the lack of English/Japanese in itself but the
combination of that and the requirement to know a lot of technical words
that you might not always find in a dictionary.

For example, it's fairly easy to find a proper translation for "Hello,
my name is Yorick" in almost any language be it Japanese, Korean or
Spanish. However, when you want to say "Hey, could you report a bug
about that segfault on the Ruby issue tracker?" things get a bit more
complicated.

A simple wiki page with some of this information might be a good start.

Yorick

p.s. I'd be happy to offer my own language knowledge which consists out
of Dutch, English and limited Korean (I'm still learning it). Sadly I
don't know any Japanese other than "moshi moshi" (oh god why).

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 4:20 PM, Magnus Holm <judofyr@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> What do you think? Would this help? If not, are there other things we
> can do to help?

Yes, this definitely highly welcome thing. Especially irc is great. In
my experience,
to interpret e-mail is not so hard but interpret irc, chat, tweet log
is much hard because
they often have some slang and/or country local expression.

Example, I didn't know what mean "Catch-22" until recent even though
it is famous common expression in several countries.