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Klingon Interpreter Needed In Oregon
myrashka writes "CNN has a report of a position available for an Klingon-English interpreter by a mental health office in Oregon (how apropos). Could this be the start of the next hot job market (perhaps they'll need Nebari-English interpreters next)?"
And I suppose in the next World War, we'll be using Klingon-speakers in our radio communications so that the Germans won't understand.
Oh cruel fate, to be thusly boned! Ask not for whom the bone bones; it bones for thee. -Bender
It's nice to know that people spend a whole lot of good time religeously studying something like Klingon, instead of some useless subject, like Portugese or Japanese. I think I will spend the next few years of my life learning how to speak fluent Modem.
I heard about some kid who wrote so much BASIC that he started speaking it.
Does that mean the staff has to learn computer languages too?
Nothing to see here; Move along.
As for Evlish, don't come crying to this guy when you need an interpreter...
Well, maybe this will bolster the legitimacy of the previously-rejected proposal to allocate a block in the Unicode standard for the Klingon alphabet.
I'm guessing that in the mental health cases, sometimes, there has to be a written record of what the patient says -- so it could be construed as a real world need for a Klingon representation. =)
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
"There are some cases where we've had mental health patients where this was all they would speak" Sounds like they had a bunch of drunk Trekies playing practical jokes on them. How possible is it to learn and use this "language" to the point of forgetting your native one?
Nurse : Can I get you something?
Mental Patient 1: S'mo fo butter layin' to the bone. Jackin' me up. Tightly.
Nurse : I'm sorry I don't understand.
Mental Patient 2: Cutty say he cant hang.
Jive Translator : Oh nurse, I speak jive.
Nurse : Ohhhh, good.
Jive Translator : He said that he's in great pain and he wants to know if you can help him.
Nurse : Would you tell him to just relax and I'll be back as soon as I can with some medicine.
Jive Translator : Jus' hang loose blooood. She goonna catch up on the`rebound a de medcide.
Mental Patient 1 : What it is big mamma, my mamma didn't raise no dummy, I dug her rap.
Jive Translator : Cut me som' slac' jak! Chump don wan no help, chump don git no help. Jive ass dude don got no brains anyhow.
At least they're not speaking a constructed language that may hold the record for fewest words in a human-experience-complete language: Toki Pona has 120 words.
Will I retire or break 10K?
They're trying to round up the last two dozen or so Star Trek fans out there and submit them for "rehabilitation" ... probably every fan made Star Wars movie ever made, 24/7, for 2 weeks, and the funny one (the Imperial Stormtroopers Cops episode) isn't included.
"I think I will spend the next few years of my life learning how to speak fluent Modem."
Will that be phone, wireless, or broadband?
Why you little wise-ass, I oughtta BweeepPhsoooooOOOOOOOooo sHOOOOooooooo bweeeeeeeeeep be boooong pshoooooooooooo!
..but with my accent, I'll never be mistaken as a native. I wonder if that disqualifies me for the position?
I am NOT a man!
I am a free number!
Klingon? Oh, hell, I'd settle for someone who can speak "Girlfriend."
My
Limekiller
As someone who lives in Oregon, this story is *not* going to go over well with the natives. As people may have noticed, the unemployment rate here is the highest in the nation, Oregon has the shortest school year, and even the courts are closed on Fridays. And now Multnomah County (where Portland is) is going to hire a Klingon interpreter after having laid off numerous school teachers, police officers, and others people see as "more necessary" public servants. There's going to be a fight over this... I can't wait to see the outfall.
IAAL
If ever there was an indication that the empire is in decline, this is it. During the worst recession in more than 20 years, in the state with the highest unemployment rate, my taxes go to support the hiring of some geeky twit who speaks a made-up language from a second-rate sci-fi TV show.
If I had a shadow of a hope that America might somehow regain its senses and do away with the recent orgy of idiocies it seems to revel in, this has pretty much quashed it. Any society which does something this incredibly stupid is a goner.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Couldn't the nurses just translate this simple phrase in to klingon and memorize it:
"You're a dork. No more TV for you. Go outside."
I live here in Portland, Oregon. This area of the U.S. is called "Ecotopia". Traditionally, people have come here who are more idealistic about the environment, and about everything. (For an explanation of Ecotopia, see the book, The Nine Nations of North America, by Joel Garreau.)
In a way, it makes sense. Mental patients are often extremely rigid. Some won't communicate at all. If the only way to communicate with a mental patient is in Klingon, that might be better than not communicating. The problems of dealing with a mentally ill patient are often far more difficult than hiring someone to speak Klingon. The expense of dealing with someone who won't communicate at all can be huge.
The state requires that hospitals hire translators for people who don't speak English well. This is because mistakes in communicating about medical things can easily be life-threatening. This is more true because people who don't speak English well often try to avoid going to hospitals, so when they do go to one, they are often VERY sick. Some of my friends have worked as translators.
Portland is more international than Georgia. There are many people from all over the world here. We have more than 8,000 Hmong tribespeople from the mountains of Vietnam here in Portland, for example. So, there are often adjustments to the special requirements of people from other cultures. As a volunteer, I've taught English to Iranian women, for example. It was interesting getting to know them; Iranians are far different than you would guess after you have read U.S. government information about Iran. The 100 or more Iranians that I've met are gentle and friendly and concerned about family. The Iranians I've met are light years away from being terrorists.
Why not?
There are people that like to learn languages to speak and express themselves in those languages with people from other places. That is the people that will learn portuguese, japanese, swedish or other languages with a few million speakers.
But then, there is also another bunch of people that just likes languages. I.e., knowing how they work, why they work like that ... and of course, creating new languages. That's what Tolkien did, that's what Marc Okrand did (he's the creator of Klingon), and that's what many people is doing. It has even a name, and it's conlanging (from CONstructed LANGuages). A wonderful introductory piece is at Boheme Magazine.
The official meeting place for conlangers is CONLANG, a mailing-list that has been going strong since 1991. And for links, you have conlanglinks, with many resources to know more about conlanging or about languages in general. The audience of CONLANG is very diverse, but I'd dare to say that most of them are either programmers or language-related people (teachers, linguists, etc.)
Conlanging is fun. Really :-) I'm no linguist, but conlanging is something very creative, and for me it's quite like a programming problem: you have some rules (that you create), and have to use them to express all the things that a language can express. And from the time that you express something in your own created tongue, you're hooked %-)
Anyway, I can understand that I'm quite weird and that many people consider this a loss of time. But hey, even Eric Raymond likes it. Basically, if you like RP games and science-fiction and have somewhat of a creative streak, you very well could like conlanging.
My own conlang is named Unahoban, and a quite incomplete and sometimes incoherent grammar is here.
My weblog in spanish
By the time they find and commit me I will speak only the language I'll have developed. [indulges in a mad laughter]
I've know people only capable of communicating in quotes from Monty Python and/or The Goon Show
But perhaps it makes sense. Given Picard's officious know-it-allness, he's probably not the great expert on Klingon culture that he pretends to be! Rather like that guy in Len Deighton's novels who thinks knowing a smattering of Cantonese gives him license to torture Chinese waiters.
And of course, rather than correct Picard, the Klingons would just say "Qapla'" back at him. Easier than ripping his throat out, as he deserves. Silly humans!
It's not like they're going to hire a full time Klingon translator and pay him/her to sit around all day in case a Klingon-speaking nutcase checks into the mental hospital. The way these translation gigs work is you sign up, they do a little bit of checking of your credentials and then they put your name on a list of people who speak that language. On the occasion that your skill is needed, they call you, you translate (often over the phone, often for just a few minutes) and you get paid for the time spent. If they never get another Klingon speaking patient, you don't get called and they haven't really spent anything (maybe they call you once a year or so to make sure you're still available). If they do get such a patient they call you and pay a few hours (or maybe minutes) of your translation bill which is probably much less than the amount they'd have to pay some doctor or other health professional to find out what the heck is wrong with the poor loon without your help.
So stop freaking out--it's not draining megabucks of your taxes, it's just putting some more phone numbers in a file. It's a completely sensible thing to do if these "Klingon patient" incidents have hapened in the past.
Also, I can tell you, a friend of mine is a translator, and sadly they don't get paid very much.
I live in georgia, and although I don't live atlanta metro right now, I did for 15 years. Who told you that there aren't widely diverse cultures and languages spoken? I can take you to generic waffle houses just a few miles apart where in one all you will hear is mostly african dialects(like somali,ethiopian,etc), drive a few miles, various asian, another few miles pure normal bubba, another few miles spanish, then another few miles pure ebonics that can be as incomphrehensible as to classify as a foreign language. There's an area outside atlanta so completely asian it's called "chambodia" a mix of "chamblee" the suburb and cambodia. There's a huge mix, people from all over the planet live here, you will definetly hear different languages spoken when you go out to the store, etc.
Sounds more like typical regional bias "elitness" to me. Everyone's pet area is "the best" or "well, WE have such and such and THEY don't and....." and everyone else's area is "weird and has such and such a stereotype attributed to it". That's just bogus man, typical jingoism.
Here's a sterotype buster for you. I used to live in rural vermont for awhile. Some of the most inbred brain dead redneck hillbillies I ever met lived there,beat the pants off some of the good ole boys around here where I live now in north georgia with just sheer lameness, along with pleasant people, and people who could hold up their end of a conversation without effort. Now you wouldn't think that because of the "understood stereotype" of various regions, but really, regional bias based on false claims is just as bogus a junk science as any other loon concept.
In the late 80s and early 90s I was interested in artifical languages: Esperanto, Volapuk, the loglan/lojban thing, and so on - the head of my thesis committee was a linguistics professor, and so I spent a lot of grad school doing linguistics-oriented work. I spent about a year studying Klingon at the time.
Around 1994, a friend called me at work asking if I'd gotten the job, but I had no idea what he was talking about as I hadn't read Sunday's want ads. Apparently the local community college had advertised for instructors in the Continuing Education department, and in the list of twenty or so things (auto repair, Indian cooking, etc.), they'd listed "Klingon language and culture". So I called, found the head of the con ed department was a Star Trek fan and wanted to see if there was anyone around who could teach the class. She hired me by the end of the phone call for an evening class. The class was offered under the foreign language section of the continuing education divison, not the pop culture section.
Interesting sidenote: community colleges here are part of the county/state government, so salaries are set by law and aren't negotiable. Since I had a master's degree in a relevant field, my per-hour pay for teaching Klingon was higher than what I was making per-hour as a technical writer.
I taught for one semester, once a week. Some of the students who showed up seemed disappointed I was actually teaching a language, as some had signed up thinking they'd spend the entire time talking about that week's episode of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. The ones who stuck with the class surprised me at how fast they learned. There weren't enough pre-registrations to offer the course a second semester, so we only did it the one time.
Seth Finkelstein investigates and finds it's a joke. Film at 11.