Star Trek: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About The Klingon Language

…As Marc Okrand recalls in a talk at Georgetown University, one line that was not originally in the script for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, but added during filming, was (from the world’s most cited soliloquy) "to be or not to be".

Given the impossibility of a direct translation into Klingon in this case, Okrand at first decided on the equivalent of "live or not live," but Christopher Plummer, who played General Chang, wasn’t too keen on how this sounded in Klingon. Okrand, in a feat of grammatical switcheroo, then came up with what is now in the movie (and, indeed, in the full Klingon rendering of the play): taH pagh taHbe [to go on(/continue) or not to go on(/continue)].

It seems that Shakespeare really IS better in the original Klingon. Hamlet has been translated, and even performed, in the language. The translated text was the work of the Klingon Language Institute’s Klingon Shakespeare Restoration Project, which equally saw the 'restoration' of Much Ado About Nothing to the honourable original.

That isn’t the only Earth writer (or pretender thereof in the Bard’s case) to have seen their work rendered in the warriors’ tongue. For example, a version of A Christmas Carol, in which the ghosts of Kahless Past, Present, and Yet-To-Come visit SQuja’, was translated and performed on stage in Klingon for many years.

As well as some original creations, other translations into Klingon have included Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (naturally), The Wizard of Oz, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince, and even certain books of the Bible.

There was also an attempt at The Klingon Kama Sutra. Ouch!