Klingon Translator

Coffee is where this Klingon translator first lied to me. "i need coffee before my meeting" came back with a word, jIgh, glossed as "I want." There's no such word in Klingon. The model just made it up and wrote a confident little label next to it. These days every answer has a second line that breaks each word down, and only dictionary words are allowed in. Coffee finally comes out right: qa'vIn vIpoQ maghompa'.

Spotted Klingon on somebody's convention lanyard? Paste it in. English comes back with the crib line under it.

How Do You Say Hello in Klingon?

nuqneH. Strictly it's "what do you want?", which tells you everything about Klingon manners. Goodbye is Qapla', "success," Klingons don't do farewells either, and a Klingon who says "have a nice day" probably wants your ship.

Klingon Phrases, Copied Off the Tool

Phrase lists online love to drop the apostrophes, which matters, since in Klingon the apostrophe is a real sound. These came straight out of the box today, crib line included.

English	Klingon it wrote	Word by word
hello my friend	nuqneH jupwI'	nuqneH (what do you want? the usual greeting) jupwI' (my friend)
do you speak klingon?	tlhIngan Hol Dajatlh'a'?	tlhIngan (Klingon) Hol (language) Dajatlh'a' (do you speak?)
today is a good day to die	Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam	Heghlu'meH (to die), QaQ (good), jajvam (today)
where is the bathroom?	nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e'	nuqDaq (where), 'oH (is), puchpa''e' (the bathroom)
i love you	qamuSHa'	qamuSHa' (I love you)
yes, i understand	HIja', jIyaj	HIja' (yes), jIyaj (I understand)
i need coffee before my meeting	qa'vIn vIpoQ maghompa'	qa'vIn (coffee) vIpoQ (I need) maghompa' (before meeting)

The bathroom line is a real one from the original Klingon dictionary. Clearly Okrand knew what a visiting Trekkie would ask first.

Klingon Words Worth Knowing

Klingon	English
nuqneH	hello (what do you want?)
Qapla'	success, goodbye
HIja'	yes
ghobe'	no
majQa'	well done
jIyajbe'	I don't understand
jup	friend
batlh	honour
Soj	food
qa'vIn	coffee
Qong	sleep
yIghoS	go away!

The capitals aren't typos. In Klingon, q and Q are two different sounds, and H is a rough throat sound, so qa'vIn and Qa'vIn would be two different things. Leave the caps alone when you copy. Your phone will try to fix them for you, so watch it, because autocorrect has no idea it's ruining a warrior's greeting.

What I Had to Fix

The made-up jIgh was the worst. It wasn't the only one. The same run glossed qaStaHvIS as "before." It means "during." So my request turned into coffee during the meeting. Tempting. Not what I typed, though.

Two lines in the prompt sorted it. One hands the model the real words for the stuff people type most, coffee and want and need and meeting included. The other says: if you're not sure a word exists, keep the English in angle brackets. A gap you can see beats a fake word you'd never spot. Klingon fans have a dictionary and long memories, and they will spot it. I also reran the same test lines after every change, the bathroom one included, so a fix for the coffee line couldn't quietly break a line that was fine. That happens more than you'd think.

"go away, i want to sleep" taught me the grammar bit, and it's the part that makes Klingon feel properly alien once you've spent ten minutes with it. The first try came back jIneH Qong, word for word in English order. Real Klingon puts the wanted thing first as its own little sentence: jIQong vIneH, "I sleep, I want it." Backwards to us, normal to a Klingon.

Klingon isn't the only made-up tongue with a real dictionary behind it. Prefer pointy ears to forehead ridges? The Elvish Translator does Tolkien's Sindarin the same way, word by word. For a visitor from much further away, try the Alien Translator. The rest are on the translators page.

Questions From the Bridge

Is Klingon a real language? Real enough to argue in. It has full grammar and a few thousand words. One American linguist even spoke only Klingon to his baby son for a few years in the nineties, though the boy grew up speaking English.

How do you say yes and no in Klingon? HIja' or HISlaH for yes, ghobe' for no. Both sound like you're clearing your throat, which is sort of the point.

What does Qapla' mean? Success. Klingons say it the way we say goodbye or good luck, usually right before something goes badly wrong.

How do you say I love you in Klingon? qamuSHa'. It's one word, because the "I" and the "you" are built into the verb as a prefix, qa-.

Who invented the Klingon language? Marc Okrand, a linguist Paramount hired for Star Trek III in 1984. The few grunts in the 1979 film came from James Doohan, who played Scotty, and Wikipedia's Klingon language page has the rest.

Does Klingon have swear words? Plenty, and Okrand's later books go into them. The tool leaves them out, but petaQ, an insult from the TV shows, is the one every Trekkie knows.