[Tlhingan-hol] Bad Klingon in Trek novels (and the like)

[Felix Malmenbeck]

> I mean, but really, in the entire book-publishing process, which
> probably took months if not years, how hard would it have been for him
> (or his editor or someone on his publishing team) to reach out to Marc
> Okrand, or the KLI, or even any one of several of us here who are
> easily found by an online search for Klingon speakers?

That's a fair point. It is very unfortunate that when the Star Trek franchise actually includes a whole language (a pretty significant lore asset, if you ask me), it's so seldom used properly.

I'm not sure if it's more understandable in TV scripts, or less: On the one hand, they're usually on a tighter schedule (plus, much of it - but not all - was done before most of the search engines we use today came into existence). On the other ... they're Paramount. And they're making on-screen canon!


That reminds me of another one, by the way, from "The Way of the Warrior":

loD SoSlI' chaw'[qu'/Qo'] SoH jatlh?
"Does your mother let you talk to men?"

Here they've clearly made some sort of effort, because the words are (sort of) the right ones and it's not a word-by-word translation.

This episode also contains the very odd line "Louk, a jeek CHIM-ta law." (<lu' 'a jIchImta' law'.>?) to mean "Yeah, but I'm a lot better looking than he was."
[In the part of my brain that deals with retconning, I regard this as an example of molor Hol (that is, whatever variant of no' Hol Molor used), which I figure Lukara and Kahless probably used to communicate with each other

DS9 would also go on to give us that scene where Kor enters Worf's quarters and greets him with "Nook neigh, Worf."
________________________________________
From: De'vID [de.vid.jonpin at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 05, 2012 11:14
To: tlhIngan-Hol
Subject: Re: [Tlhingan-hol] Bad Klingon in Trek novels (and the like)

loghaD:
> [I should point out that the author of "Star Trek: Cast No Shadow" is probably a perfectly nice person, too ... but not a very good klingonist ;) ]

I mean, but really, in the entire book-publishing process, which
probably took months if not years, how hard would it have been for him
(or his editor or someone on his publishing team) to reach out to Marc
Okrand, or the KLI, or even any one of several of us here who are
easily found by an online search for Klingon speakers?  Or even just
to read The Klingon Dictionary, which isn't even that long (if he'd
written *{ghobe' QIb chuH maghwI'}, it would've shown he made the
minimum effort)?  What happened to authors doing proper research for
their books?

Are Klingon speakers/translators that hard to find?  The KLI web site
redesign (yes, it needs to be redesigned, and preferably yesterday)
needs to have an easily findable page that says, "If you are an author
looking to use Klingon in your work, please contact us and we will
provide any assistance you need in the Klingon language."

--
De'vID

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