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Language of Klingon, Jobs and Employment

This webpage was created to help people speaking Klingon find work. Below are some weblinks to help you find work in your local area. If you know of any others, please feel free to suggest them to us so that we can add them to these pages.

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Klingon Web Links Related to Jobs, Employment, Translations and Other

http://www.kli.org/ - the Klingon language institute
http://dictionary.klingonreference.com/ - the Klingon Dictionary
http://klingonska.org/ - Klingon website
http://www.klingon.org/menu.html - Klingon website
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-klingon/ - google in the Klingon language

Yes, you guessed it, this is the language of the Star Trek characters. I guess Trekky fans can really go overboard, but this has developed into a full fledged language - although fabricated.
First devised by Scotty (James Doohan - who contributed about a dozen words) for the motion picture "Star Trek: the Motion Picture" (all previous times the Klingons spoke English), it has since then been taken up and developed by Marc Okrand, who drew inspiration from some of the native American languages he studied. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Klingon is the most spoken fictional language by number of speakers.
When the language was being further developed, Paramount wanted it to sound harsh, while Okrand wanted it to sound alien or unusual, so he selected sounds not found in other languages and which are difficult to pronounce.
Many Trekky fans have learned the language to the point of conversing, although this can be difficult since the vocabulary is limited and centred around Trekky concepts like spacecrafts and warfare. For example, although there may be terms for "transporter ioniser unit" and "bridge" (of a ship), there is no term for a bridge over a river. In any case, skilled Trekky fans boast they are capable of mundane conversation, in light of the difficulties.

Okrand added more words and started to construct grammar for later movies starring with the original cast, where the difficulty of translation even served as a plot device for "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country".
With the Next Generation series, the language was made more robust, and in one episode, there was even a request to speak "human Klingon" so that the translator could understand and interpret. Apparently there are now dialects within Klingon that humans are not able to understand. In a later prequel episode, the language was described as having "eighty polyguttural dialects constructed on an adaptive syntax".

There are at least three books written in the Klingon language, where two of them (Hamlet, and Much Ado About Nothing) were inspired by a comment made by High Chancellor Gorkon who said that Shakespeare was best read in Klingon. One explanation surfaced that a future Klingon time traveller had translated some Klingonese operas and sold them to the English playwright. There is also a Klingon anthem available on audio tape.
One Trekky fan, whose university dissertation topic was "Representation of American Sign Language for Machine Translation", even tried to raise his child in a Klingon-English bilingual household, but the project failed when the child rebelled, mostly because he could not communicate in it with his friends and it lacked important household words like "table", "diapers" and "pacifier". But the language is robust in other terms, having many different words to describe "to fight" or "clash", depending on the intensity of the act, and the language has a great variety of curses (considered a fine art in the Klingon culture).
Its alphabetical characters were created by a company for the first motion picture and who drew inspiration from the Klingon Battlecruiser hull markings and Tibetan script, which looks sharp - as a testament to the Klingons' love for knives and blades (view picture to left).

Some words include nuqneH, which is the only Klingon greeting and literally means: "What do you want?" Trekky fans use it regularly when meeting.
Paramount controls the copyright to the official dictionary and other descriptions of the language, although some contest that this may not be possible due to the US Supreme Court's Feist ruling. No challenges have yet been brought to court.
The language is used and referenced in many films, TV and culture, and is also available in the Language Tools on Google, where most of the site is translated.

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