Q'Plah! Bing now translates Klingon

Here's one reason for fans of "Star Trek" to use Microsoft's Bing search engine: Bing now has Klingon in its language translator tool.

 

This allows people to translate words —or even entire websites— from English into Klingon and the other way around, tech site Mashable reported.

 

"This is an idea we were kicking around for awhile. Star Trek has always looked at the future of technology and it is the most widely spoken constructed language, even though only a handful of people are actually fluent," Matt Wallaert, behavioral scientist at Bing, told Mashable.

 

Wallaert added that, while there had been dictionary efforts with Klingon, "there has not been a true translation service with full grammatical structure until now."

 

Mashable said Bing worked with the linguistics Ph.D. Marc Okrand, who developed the language for the "Star Trek" series.

 

Bing also worked with 10 people fluent in Klingon to train the systems. It likewise got help from the Klingon Language Institute.

 

Also, Mashable noted Klingon breaks some of the rules of typical languages, so it could be harder to learn than languages like Spanish or Italian.

 

"This is a geeky thing for us to do, but it's also a fun challenge of our own teams to enhance translations and work with a language with a distinctive pattern," Wallaert said. — TJD, GMA News