Russian for IT Professionals. Key Terms and Communication Tips

Names and identifying details of every student here are changed, as they are everywhere on the blog.

Most Russian technical vocabulary is English wearing a Cyrillic coat. Деплой, коммит, релиз, баг, мёрж, фича. You can read a Russian pull request on your first day and understand roughly what it says, which is why nearly every learner here starts with a terminology list and nearly none needs one.

The vocabulary is the part you already have

One backend developer I taught for two years could follow every word in his team’s standup by month three. In month seven he agreed to something in a planning call and could not afterward say what.

I understood all of it, he said. I just didn’t understand what was being decided. He had been in that call for forty minutes. He had built a terminology list in his first month, three hundred entries, and kept adding because that was where progress showed.

Recognizing every word in a sentence is not the same as knowing what the sentence is doing.

What the borrowed words hide

Terms come across intact. The grammar wrapped around them does not, and that grammar carries what you need, which is why the sentences that catch people are built from words they know.

Russian verbs mark whether an action is finished. In a technical conversation that is the difference between задеплоил and деплоил: the thing is out, or somebody spent an afternoon on it. He had been hearing both as deployed, which meant half the status updates he sat through were telling him something other than what he took away from them. Negation in front of a familiar term does the same thing. Не будем деплоить до пятницы went past him at speed as something about deploying and Friday, and he spent that week expecting a release nobody had promised. Then comes the ты and вы boundary, which in a distributed team moves faster than anybody explains it and never at a moment anybody announces.

A term you recognize is a term you stop listening past.

These are not the hard words. They are the ones where a borrowed term sits next to a Russian word that quietly changes what the whole phrase is doing. The right column is what a colleague hears. The left is what a dictionary gives you, and every misunderstanding I have watched happen on a mixed team lives in the gap between the two.

Code review reads differently than you expect

English review culture softens with padding: maybe consider, what do you think about, nit. Russian technical review runs flatter than that, and English speakers reliably read the flatness as displeasure with them personally.

The same developer sent me a screenshot of a comment on his pull request. Three words, no hedging. He had read it as hostile and spent an evening rewriting perfectly good code.

Это работает? was the whole comment. Not a verdict but a question, left by somebody who wanted to know whether the thing worked, and establishing that cost him an evening. He answered with four paragraphs explaining his design. The reply came back as one word, ок, which he read as the argument being lost. Nothing had been lost. The reviewer asked, got an answer, and closed the thread the way people close threads. Whatever politeness Russian carries inside its grammar has nowhere to go in three words. In short technical exchanges there is no room for it, which makes them read blunter than the person writing them intended. Не успеваем usually arrives well before anybody is actually late. It’s a warning rather than an admission, and English speakers tend to hear it as either dramatic or as news that the thing has already gone wrong. One student replied to it with a rescue plan and confused everybody, because nothing had gone wrong yet. What the sentence wanted was an acknowledgment and possibly a smaller scope. That thread came to me afterward with a question about what he should have written instead. Two words, as it turned out. Что убираем asks which piece comes out, and because it takes the deadline as given and puts the decision back on the table, it arrives as a colleague solving the problem rather than a manager showing up with a plan nobody asked for.

A warning about a deadline is not a report that it has passed.

If you write to Russian-speaking colleagues as well as talk to them, the conventions for the письмо itself are a separate problem and worth reading about separately.

The word that has no English equivalent

Костыль means a crutch. In code it means a workaround the author is not proud of, and the apology is built into the word instead of added afterward. No neutral English term exists for it. Hack is admiring, workaround is bureaucratic, technical debt names a category. Russian has one word carrying the apology inside it, which is why English speakers on mixed teams adopt it untranslated within a month. Это костыль, потом переделаем is a complete sentence, a confession and a plan. The first time a student uses it correctly in a standup is usually the moment colleagues stop switching to English for him.

I made the same mistake in the other direction for a year

Nobody warned me either, and my version was worse because from the outside it looked as though everything was going fine for a year, which is exactly how long it went on.

When I started working with American colleagues I read their written feedback as far kinder than it was. It might be worth checking whether this handles the empty case is a defect report. I filed sentences like that under polite suggestion for about a year, because every one of them arrived wrapped in enough softening to sound optional. What ended it was a colleague saying in a meeting that two of us had a habit of ignoring her comments. I went back through eight months of threads that evening and counted eleven of hers I had read and not acted on. Every one was a real finding, phrased as a question or a maybe.

English review softens the sentence. It does not soften the finding.

I read the qualifiers as packaging now and the noun phrase as the message, which took embarrassingly long to learn and works in both directions once you have it. It is also why I no longer tell students that Russian technical comments are blunt. They are short. Blunt is what short looks like from the other side. At Palme School we teach adults online, in groups of up to eight, two forty-minute classes a week, and the first two lessons are free. You can book those here, and there are printable materials for learners in our resource library.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need Russian if my team already works in English?

For the standups, no. For what gets decided in the messages that are not in English, which on a mixed team is more of them than anybody admits, yes.

Which Russian IT terms should I learn first?

Not the borrowed ones, which you already know. Learn the verb pairs around them and the four or five phrases that carry judgment: в целом ок, спорный момент, надо посмотреть, не успеваем.

Why do Russian code review comments sound harsh?

Because they are short, and Russian carries its politeness in grammar that has nowhere to sit in three words. A blunt-looking comment is usually a question.

How long before I can follow a technical conversation?

Following it comes early, because the vocabulary is borrowed. Knowing what was decided comes considerably later, and that gap surprises people.

Palme School: Russian for bilingual children · Conversation school · Free materials

Lily Rozberg has been teaching for sixteen years, first English in Russia and now Russian to bilingual children across the US and Canada. She writes for Palme School about heritage language, reading, and the things report cards do not measure.