ELPAC Report July 2003

The ELPAC Report July 2003

Klingon Spoken Here

On May 11, Multnomah County, Oregon, made language history by actively advertising for speakers of the mythical language Klingon, made famous by the television program Star Trek. The county mental health division, like all government agencies, is required by Clinton-era Executive Order 13166 to provide free translations into any language requested by any of their 60,000 patients.

According to the Contra Costa (Calif.) Times newspaper, Jerry Jelusich, a procurement specialist for the county Department of Human Services said, ">We have to provide information in all the languages our clients speak."

But do people actually speak Klingon? "There are some cases where we've had mental health patients where this was all they would speak," said the county's purchasing administrator, Franna Hathaway.

County officials told the Times that obligates them to respond with a Klingon-English interpreter. The newspaper wryly noted that the county's action "put the language of starship Enterprise officer Worf and other Klingon characters on a par with common languages such as Russian and Vietnamese, and with less common ones as Dari and Tongan."

After a couple of days of national derision, the county came to its senses, and decided that it wasn't necessary to translate into Klingon. They are still advertising for translators for another 50 languages.