This article is about a Star Trek book. Maybe you are looking for the Klingon translation of a chinese book entitled "The Art of War".

The Klingon Art of War

The Klingon Art of War is a book by Keith R. A. De Candido published in 2014. The book talks about wisdom and Kahless' teachings of courage, discipline and honour. It contains several Klingon words, sometimes written in true tlhIngan Hol, sometimes in an English transcription.

Klingon language

For this book, the author has not contacted Marc Okrand, but he got support from few experienced klingonists. Okrand has vetted a list of words for the qepHom Saarbrücken in 2014, but not all the words. Some of the used words had already been confirmed for the glossary of the author's other books A Burning House and Diplomatic Implausibility.

Felix Malmenbeck was one of several klingonists who helped provide translations for this book(1). Many of the suggestions were implemented, but there are also lots of mistakes, obviously translated by bing, such as translating the "destroy the castle form" as pa' Qaw' chenmoH (2).

Comment

This is an OPINION PAGE. It may contain different points of view about different parts of Klingon. You may add useful thoughts, but please remember this is not a forum.

I'm actually kind of mad about this. I've read the book now, except the two appendices. He mostly uses the style used in other Star Trek works unrelated to Okrandian tlhIngan Hol, such as "trigak" or "bekk". But he does occasionally make a point of using the transcription system devised, as the in-universe explanation goes, by Federation linguists to write tlhIngan Hol, and almost always he gets it wrong. He uses chenmoH throughout to mean "form" [as a noun] as in "martial arts form", when we have a perfectly good word lol for this. And he's clearly just plugged English words and phrases into Bing without any regard for correctness. He even claimed explicitly that Daq means "against". If this is some fan fic on a web site, that's forgiveable, but in a published book under Star Trek license?

The content of the book is quite enjoyable. As an imitation (or a send-up) of self-help books allegedly translated from an ancient text, with added modern commentary, it's perfect. (Anyone who's read an English translation of Sun Tzu's Art of War aimed at a business audience will understand what I mean.)

It's just too bad that the language part of it was so awful.

De'vID (3)

Details

pages	160
Release Date	6 May 2014
Publisher	Pocket Books
ISBN-10	1-4767-5739-9

References

1 : Message to the Email Discussion Forum on Thu, May 22, 2014

2 : The Klingon Art of War, p. 64

3 : Message to the Email Discussion Forum on Mon, Jun 02, 2014