Today's Wall Street Journal has an article today in its Careers section about the man who invented Klingon and how the opportunity came his way. Enjoy!
Helping the Hearing Impaired And Voicing the Klingons
By DENNIS NISHI
Full name: Marc Okrand Age: 60
Hometown: Los Angeles
Current position: Director of live captioning, National Captioning Institute First job: Radio DJ Favorite job: This one
Education: B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley
Years in the industry: 30
How I got to here in 10 words or less: I kept an open mind.
After earning a Ph.D. in linguistics, Marc 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, Mr. Okrand met the producer for the movie "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." That led to a twist in his career: He was hired to create the Vulcan language and, later, the Klingon dialogue. Mr. Okrand has since expanded his work on Star Trek languages into several books, including The Klingon Dictionary.
Q. Before joining the National Captioning Institute, what did you do?
A. I taught linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara before taking a post doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 1978. I researched a couple of California Indian languages that haven't been spoken in a long time. The last native speaker had died long ago so relearning it was mostly based on documents.
Q. How did you figure out how to properly pronounce the words?
A. A guy from the Smithsonian had actually spoken with the last remaining speaker of the language. He was a trained phonetician so he took very good notes. There were some Edison cylinders (used to create early recordings) of some songs in a related language.
Q. What did you do after your fellowship?
A. I applied for a few academic jobs but none of them panned out. Shortly afterward, I met somebody at a party who worked at what was then the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. He worked with the deaf and suggested I work with closed captioning. Back then, it was a new technology.
Q. What made you decide to pursue the job?
A. It was language related and broadcasting, which is what I was doing before. It seemed like a fit. A few interviews later, they hired me as supervisor of captioning at the National Captioning Institute. This was back in 1979.
Q. What did you do then and how has it changed?
A. I was in charge of a number of television programs and movies. Once we got the videotape, I'd oversee transcribing the audio and changing the grammar and vocabulary. Eventually, I was in charge of captioning for live broadcasts. We used to use court reporter steno machines. We (now) use speech recognition and (work live).
Q. How did you go from captioning to the Klingon language?
A. We did the Oscars for the first time in 1982. Much of it is scripted and can be done beforehand, but we had to jump in with the court reporters right after the presenters said, "and the winner is…" In Los Angeles, I visited a friend who worked at Paramount. Her boss was the producer of the second Star Trek movie. They were planning on hiring a linguist from UCLA to create some lines of Vulcan for Leonard Nimoy and Kirstie Alley. There was a mix up and I ended up getting the job.
Q. So you created the Vulcan language?
A. They had already shot the scene in English. Someone later decided it was better if they spoke Vulcan. I had to create gobbledygook that matched their lips so it could be dubbed in.
Q. And that led you to create the more complex Klingon language?
A. I got to work from scratch for the third film, which included creating grammar and vocabulary (for the Klingon language). I did base some sounds off the lines spoken in the first film. But I came up with some basic rules and stuck to them.
Q. Did you draw from real languages?
A. You can't help being influenced by what you know, which (for me) was a bit of Spanish, French and American Indian. I also knew Southeast Asian languages. I'd be writing something and suddenly realize that it sounded like Navajo. I'd stop and make sure the next thing sounded as different as it could possibly be. I expanded the language for the fifth and sixth film and wrote a book called The Klingon Dictionary in 1992.
Q. How do you feel about creating a new language?
A. I think it's great. I hear it's taught in some linguistics classes and I've seen chapters incorporated into linguistics textbooks. Of course, I have to give credit to James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty. He invented the first six lines from the first film.
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