Helping Out-of-Work Klingons

The Illinois Department of Employment Security is solving a Klingon unemployment problem you didn’t know existed. IDES offers its website in the Klingon language, as well as in Spanish, Russian, and (Simplified) Chinese.

But don’t worry, Senator Grassley — the service is a free component of Microsoft Translator. It was created as a promotion for the Star Trek: Into Darkness movie and has been kept around because it draws more traffic to the department’s website.

A byproduct of never assigning employees to check the Klingon translation of IDES’ 280-page website, as the department has for other languages, is that no one has fixed the problem that some words, like “appeal” and “unemployment,” don’t translate, they remain in English.

Oh, well. As they say in Klingon, “Yap qum Qap SoQ,” — “Close enough for government work.”

 

[Thanks to Sam Long for the story.]

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