Is Klingon the new Esperanto?

12

Category : Just geeky

Klingon

Bantu1 alerted me via e-mail about an interesting twist by a software development company to localize their application. Bantu1 states:

The following was brought to my attention yesterday by someone-keen-to-keep-his-job-and-therefore-not-to-be-named:

A Klingon translation of a well-known anti-virus program!

We all know you can study Klingon nowadays at university, but is it really becoming so mainstream that geeks in technology companies can while away the time between biscuits translating their product into a language for the masses?

Hardly, methinks. As far as I can make out (and am assured by he-who-must-not-be-named), it has all the virus-busting capabilities of the standard, english version – so why do it? A sugar-fuelled mind-expanding exercise? To communicate messages to other business-Klingons?

Being only a conversational Klingon speaker myself, I was surprised to find I could download it without difficulty  – it came with an English user manual (I guess Mr. Translator got bored). It didn’t appear to Vulcan-mind-grip my hard drive, and it even handily cleaned up a particularly nasty bit of loitering spyware.
But surely whoever did this is just inviting trouble. Not least from criticisms of his translation from other would-be Klingon software developers, but for being the forefather of a deluge of mainstream programs aimed at the wrinkly-headed ones.

Is Klingon destined for great things? Not wanting to sport a Mars bar on my head just to blend in, I hope not.

Is this e-mail simply hype generated by the company to raise the visibility of their AV software? Probably, but who cares as long as this is legit. :-)

Here’s a video demo of the Klingon version:

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Comments (12)

“Is Klingon the new Esperanto?” Definitely not! Esperanto is a practical planned second language which deserves to be even more widely used.

Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net

What do people think?

You’re right of course :-)

I think the first time i learned of Esperanto was as a teen when I read the Stainless Steel Rat series of novels by Harry Harrison. In his stories, Esperanto is the universal language of the future.

“Mr. Translator” here.
No, I didn’t get bored. I just wasn’t asked to translate the manuel. Only the software itself.

Good work roneyii. Have you translated anything else from English to Klingon? Do you read Klingon or did you use a brute force method of some other method?

Re Ardano:
The site about this new project Ardano (it can’t really be called a language till there is a sufficient number of speakers) fails to note that the wordstock of Esperanto was selected on the pragmatic basis of ‘maximum internationality’. Ardano on the other is trying to be ‘politically correct’ by including words from many languages. As a Manxman, may I ask ‘how many words have you included from Manx Gaelic?’. If there are none, as I strongly suspect, may I then claim linguistic discrimination?
Esperanto works fine around the world as it is – why try to reinvent the wheel?

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