Follow Us & Boldly Be Social RSS Feed Like us on facebook follow us on twitter Find us on flickr Watch us on youtube

Creator Of The Klingon Language, Marc Okrand, On The Latest SciFi Diner Podcast

Our good friends, Scott & Miles, at The SciFi Diner Podcast just posted their interview with Klingon language creator Marc Okrand. Recorded at the most recent Farpoint Convention, Scott & Miles got to spend time with Mark and talk about his experiences in the Trek universe as well as his time working Disney's Atlantis, creating the Atlantean language.

About Mark (from episode description)

Okrand took a job at the National Captioning Institute, where he worked on the first closed-captioning system for hearing impaired television viewers. While coordinating closed captioning for the Oscars award show in 1982, Dr. Okrand met the producer for the movie Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.[1] He was hired by Paramount Pictures to develop the Klingon language and coach the actors using it in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Star Trek: The Next Generation. His first work was dubbing in Vulcan language dialogue for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, since the actors had already been filmed talking in English. He has since consulted for the 2009 Star Trek film in their use of the Romulan and Vulcan languages.

Okrand is the author of two books about Klingon – The Klingon Dictionary (first published 1985) and Klingon for the Galactic Traveler (1997). He has also co-authored the libretto of an opera in the Klingon language: ‘u’, debuting at The Hague in September 2010. The tlh sound that he incorporated into Klingon, unusual to speakers of North American English, is common in other English accents, and in North and Central American indigenous languages, in which it is usually transcribed as tl, t? or ?(a voiceless alveolar affricate with lateral release); this is the sound at the end of the word “Nahuatl”. He speaks Klingon, but notes that others have attained greater fluency.

As always, we can't recommend this podcast enough. Be sure to visit their official website and download the podcast below.

Download the episode here.

Visit the SciFi Diner website here.

Bye Bye, Robot: Official Licensed Star Trek Fine Art