Update: Bing has now made the official announcement.
Bing is reportedly adding the Klingon language to Bing Translator as part of a marketing deal between Microsoft and Paramount, as the studio prepares to release Star Trek Into Darkness.
While we’ve been unable to bring up the language in Bing Translator so far, The LA Times (via Engadget) reports that it is coming today:
The Bing service will translate text written in any one of 41 supported languages — including English, French, Hebrew and Urdu — into Klingon. Fear not, native Klingon speakers: words or phrases written in that language can be translated into the more than three dozen available tongues.
According to the report, Microsoft engineer helped develop the feature, has he apparently speaks Klingon. The LA Times shares a quote from Bing’s Craig Beilinson: “We have people who understand the deep science of linguistics and we also have people who are passionate about the ‘Star Trek’ franchise. This was a labor of love from a lot of different avenues.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the Klingon Language utilized by a major search engine. You can still see the Google Klingon homepage here.
Star Trek Into Darkness releases in the U.S. on May 17th.
Image: StarTrek.com