Bing Translator Gains Support For Star Trek Language Klingon

Microsoft has teamed up with Paramount Pictures to bring Trekkies a translation tool essential for interplanetary communications: support for the alien language Klingon on Bing Translator. The feature was added in honor of the latest installment of the movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness, which hit theaters today. As with other languages, translation works both directions.

Users can type an English phrase and receive its Klingon translation in the proper alphabet, and for those times when you need a Klingon translation, you can reverse the process and enter the alien phrases, in turn getting the English translation. The feature is available via the Web version of Bing, and via the Bing Translator app for Windows Phone 8 with the update Microsoft rolled out.

Microsoft went into detail on how the translation process project was performed over on MSDN, offering an explanation in both English and another in Klingon, for those fluent among us. The project was done in partnership with the Klingon Language Institute, and was particularly difficult because of the lack of substantial texts in the language, let alone transcribed texts.

That is where the fan community came in, providing feedback and corrections. The translation engine was trained with an initial bought of transcribed Klingon texts using the Microsoft Translator Hub. Over time, the combination of these two things resulted in more accurate results as the project progressed and was refined, and finally the finished project, which is now available.

You can get a translation in either Latin script or in its native plqaD script, but Microsoft advises that you must manually select the language rather than relying on Auto-Detect. If the translation option isn't enough for you, there's also a widget that can be added to websites, allowing visitors to translate the pages into the Star Trek language. And just for the record, this is how you say SlashGear in Klingon:

SOURCE: Bing