[sbierwagen]

Japanese uses Chinese characters heavily, but they're obviously pronounced nothing like they are in Mandarin, and their contextual meaning has drifted over the last thousand years. Japan and China have also made many different choices in technical loanwords-- Japanese tends to transcribe loanwords directly but English is often lightly mangled by Japanese phonology: you can puzzle over キーボード (kiiboodo) for a while but unless it's in context the English word "keyboard" won't jump out.

[kevin_thibedeau]

I had to work with some code from a Japanese manufacturer and translated some of the comments. I got stuck on デバドラ (debadora) for a while. It was clearly Japanized English but it took a while to realize it is "device driver".

[bryondowd]

Man, I had a similar experience working with code from a French manufacturer. The comments were mostly translatable, but the variable names were hell. It's bad enough trying to figure out in English whether acc is an abbreviation of acceleration, or accuracy, or some acronym, etc. Trying to expand a three letter abbreviations in a language you don't know it's nearly impossible.

Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.

[cyphar]

They like four-character abbreviations a lot (obviously you have 四字熟語, but most onomatopoeia are four kana, and a lot of other emphatic words are four kana). I was watching a let's play YouTuber who started referring to Breath of the Wild as ブレワイ (burewai).

[smcl]

I guess we do the same in English - obviously there’s using an acronym (BotW) but often people will use a single word in a multi-word title - like “Smash” for one of the Smash Brothers games

[amyjess]

From my experience, the Japanese love four-katakana abbrevations as much as English-speakers love our two-letter and three-letter acronyms.

For example, we abbreviate "personal computer" as PC. In Japanese, it's パーソナルコンピューター (pāsonaru konpyūtā), abbreviated as パソコン (pasokon; roughly "persocom"). Similarly, "remote control" is R/C. In Japanese, it's リモートコントロール (rimōto kontorōru), abbreviated as リモコン (rimokon; roughly "remocon"). You can even see this with proprietary trademarks, such as the Nintendo Family Computer ファミリーコンピュータ (Famirī Konpyūta) abbreviated as ファミコン (Famikon; roughly "Famicom")... which I guess is four and a half katakana, but it's still four morae. And in English-speaking markets, it was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System, which we've abbreviated as NES.