I vaguely recall someone suggesting "bricoleur" as the French translation of "hacker" (in the positive sense), though they've officially adopted something else not nearly as interesting.
The (official) French neologism for "hacker" is "fouineur", which translates roughly as "one who pokes one's nose into things".
http://dev.null.org/blog/archive.cgi/2001/11/03#2218_fouineur.r
The verb is "bricoler", lit. "to arrange"; bricolage and bricoleur are derived forms.
this is an off-the-topic one, but vaguely in the same vein (with bonus corporate stupidity): pajero, a popular 4-wheel-drive with inner-city dwellers means wanker in spanish... and "bricoler" is basically "to tinker [with something]", and "un bricoleur" is a handyman, "bricolage" being what a bricoleur does :)
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Tue Dec 18 07:13:50 2001
You are right indeed about bricolage/bricoleur. You might be able to find online the first chapter of Claude Levi Strauss' classic _The Savage Mind_ which talks about bricolage as a metaphor for the social construction of knowledge.