Last night I had an IM conversation with a new friend of mine whose English name is Patrick. During the conversation he told me that he turned down an offer to do some hacker programming against paypal. Now I know the Chinese word for hacker.

黑客

The word is a transliteration. Transliterations are several Chinese characters that form the sound of the word but by themselves mean nothing. Broken down this is

黑 : hēi (pronounced like hey): This is the character for the color black (黑色）
客 ：kè :By itself it means visitor, quest but it can also be used to mean helping/serving (of food).

If you take the sounds of the character and leave behind the meaning of the characters you get "Hey Ke" which sounds like "Hacker".

I'm off to the chat rooms to see if I can learn any other nefarious terms.