It turns out that the call for tlhIngan (Klingon) interpreters was a joke of sorts.  Of course, the computer industry has been ready to deal with this sort of situation for a couple of years.  The Internet Assigned Number Authority (IANA) has assigned it the language tag i-klingon for use in locale-sensitive code.

Klingon is interesting in that it is an actual language that can be used for real communication.  The writers of Star Trek wanted it to make sense, so they consulted a linguist (Dr Marc Okrand) .  After the publication of The Klingon Dictionary: English-Klingon Klingon-English in 1992, some people got together and created The Klingon Language Institute .

As they say, you haven’t read Hamlet until you’ve read it in the original Klingon. 

A word of caution—the Klingon Language Institute seems to be run off the world’s slowest server, so some of those links above may take a while to open.

From what I can see, though, the most important phrase you can know in tlhIngan is “nuqDaq yuch Dapol”, which translates as “Where do you keep the chocolate?”

I wonder what the tlhIngan phrase for “Trek geek” is…

Qapla’