Klingon Broke Our Damage Record. Then It Translated Hamlet Perfectly.

We have run a lot of sentences through a lot of languages on this site. Nothing has behaved like Klingon.

Start with the result that stopped us. Here is the most famous line in English, sent one hop into Klingon and straight back:

In: To be or not to be, that is the question
Klingon: taH pagh taHbe', DaH mu'tlheghvam vIqelnIS
Out: To be, or not to be, that is the question.

Damage score: 0.000. Nothing moved.

For comparison, we once sent that identical line through five ordinary human languages and it came back as "True or false, what's the problem?". Buryat, Chichewa, Bambara, Esperanto and Hebrew between them destroyed it. Klingon handed it back intact.

And taH pagh taHbe' is not a machine's guess. It is the published line from the Klingon Language Institute's translation of Hamlet, the one Chancellor Gorkon quotes in Star Trek VI when he says you have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon. The translator did not translate the sentence. It recognized it.

All results below are real output from Translation Mixer, collected in August 2026. Klingon and the other languages in the ranking are served by Microsoft Azure Translator, which is the only one of our two engines that offers them.

It knows the canon cold

We fed it eight well-known lines. Look at what came back:

Every one of those Klingon phrases is canonical. Qapla' is the standard Klingon "success." bortaS bIr jablu'DI' reH QaQqu' nay' is the proverb Chang quotes in Star Trek VI. Heghlu'meH QaQ jajvam is Kahless. pujwI' HIvlu'chugh quvbe'lu' is out of Marc Okrand's dictionary. These are not literal word-for-word constructions that happen to be right. They are the attested phrases, returned as units.

The greeting is the one that gives the game away, and it is the best result in the table. We asked for "Hello, my friend" and got nuqneH, jupwI'. Klingon has no word for hello. nuqneH is the closest thing it has to a greeting and it literally means "What do you want?" The machine knew to use the culturally correct non-greeting, which is genuinely impressive, and then on the way back rendered it politely as "Good day, friend," which throws away the entire joke. A Klingon demanding to know your business became a pleasant hello.

Then we gave it a sentence no Klingon has ever written

Canon is one thing. Here is the standard paragraph we use to score every language on this site, sent through Klingon:

In: When my grandmother passed away last spring, she left behind a small wooden box full of old photographs. I hadn't realized how much she meant to us until I sat there flipping through pictures I'd never seen before, each one telling a story I would probably never fully understand. It made me wonder what memories I would leave behind someday, and whether anyone would take the time to look.

Out: When my grandmother passed away last winter, she left behind a small wooden box containing old photographs. I didn't realize how important it was to us, because I was sitting there with pictures I hadn't seen before, and I certainly didn't really understand the story. One day, I was going to take the time to document the event and take some time to look at it.

Damage: 0.441. That is the highest score we have ever recorded, against any language, in any test on this site. Japanese, which won our 20 language damage ranking, managed 0.385.

Three things broke, and each one is a vocabulary gap rather than a grammar failure:

• Spring became winter. Klingon rendered the season as poH bIr, which means "cold time." The language has a small seasonal vocabulary built for a world that is not Earth, and the nearest available slot was the cold one.
• She became it. The grandmother loses her gender. Klingon has no gender-marking third-person pronoun, and neither do nine of the 20 languages in our main ranking, where four of those nine made this exact mistake.
• The ending inverted. "Whether anyone would take the time to look" is a question about being remembered by others. It came back as "I was going to take the time to document the event," which is the narrator resolving to do something. The subject flipped from anyone to I, and wondering became planning.

So the same language that returns Hamlet unscratched cannot carry a paragraph about a dead grandmother. That is not a contradiction. It is the whole story.

Memorization is not fluency

Klingon has roughly 3,000 known words. English has hundreds of thousands. Klingon was built by one linguist, Marc Okrand, starting in 1984, deliberately shaped to feel alien: object-verb-subject word order, heavy affixing, and a vocabulary weighted toward combat, ships, and honor.

A translation model trained on that has seen a small, closed corpus in which the same few hundred famous sentences appear over and over, and almost nothing else. So it behaves like a very good phrasebook and a very bad translator. Hand it a line from the corpus and it returns the canonical answer perfectly. Hand it a sentence nobody has ever needed to say in Klingon and it has to build from a vocabulary that was never designed to say it.

You can measure that split directly. We wrote four sentences in the register Klingon was built for, and four in the register it was not:

Martial average 0.269, domestic average 0.393.

The individual failures are better than the averages. "Please pass the salt" came back as "Give it salt," because Klingon has no word for please, so the politeness simply evaporates and you are left with a command. In the same sentence, kettle was left sitting in the Klingon as the English word kettle, untranslated, because there is no Klingon for it.

The dentist sentence is the one to frame. Klingon has no word for Tuesday, so the machine reached into French and used mardi. It has no word for dentist, so it used Qel, doctor, twice in a row. It has no word for appointment, so "I booked an appointment" became "I need to be ready." A routine errand turned into a warrior preparing himself.

And "she knitted a soft pink blanket for the baby" came back as a soft pink carpet, because tlhIm covers floor covering and Klingon does not distinguish the thing you put on a bed.

Where Klingon ranks against real languages

Klingon is one of 19 languages our Azure engine offers that our Google engine does not. Since they were all sitting there, we ran the identical paragraph through every one of them:

A made-up language beat eighteen real ones. That is the result we came for, and it holds up: same paragraph, same method, same engine, one round trip each.

Two honest caveats. This ranking runs on Azure, while our 20 language ranking ran on Google, so comparing Klingon's 0.441 directly against Japanese's 0.385 across engines is looser than comparing within either list. And "languages Google doesn't offer" is a less exotic list than it sounds: Spanish (Mexico) is a regional variant of Spanish and finished last at 0.068, and Chinese (Traditional) is a script difference. The interesting half of the list is the genuinely low-resource half.

Three results from that half are worth pulling out:

• Ganda, second place, turned "my grandmother" into "my grandfather." Luganda uses one ungendered word for grandparent. It also moved "last spring" to "last year," which is what happens when you ask an equatorial language about a temperate season.
• Querétaro Otomi demoted the grandmother a generation, to "my mother."
• Bodo turned the old photographs into "ancient paintings," and "whether anyone would take the time to look" into "if anyone would go back in time."
• Chinese (Literary) did the opposite of damage in one sense. It kept the meaning almost intact but lifted the register into classical prose: "I did not realize how important it was to us," and "whether anyone would be willing to examine them carefully." Your family memoir comes back as an essay from a much older book.

One more thing, if you have the font

Everything above is written in Latin letters, which is not how Klingon is actually written. The script is pIqaD, and it is not in Unicode. A proposal to encode it was rejected, so it lives in the Private Use Area, where no standard system font covers it.

The mixer ships the font anyway. Here is the Hamlet line as a Klingon would write it:

  

That is taH pagh taHbe'. And this is Qapla':



If those look like empty boxes, the font did not load and you are seeing the Private Use Area doing what it does without one. The mixer itself checks whether the font is available before drawing anything and hides the pIqaD line when it is not, which is a check a static page like this one cannot make.

Worth being clear about what this is: a transliteration, not a second translation. pIqaD is the same Klingon words in a different alphabet, so the mixer converts the letters locally rather than spending another API call on it.

Try it

The Hamlet line is loaded, since a constructed language handing Shakespeare back perfectly is not what anyone predicts:

→ Send Hamlet through Klingon

Then try the opposite. Ask it about a dentist appointment, a grocery list, or anything involving a blanket, and watch a language built for warfare try to cope with a Tuesday.

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Related: Shakespeare: True or False? is the same line through five human languages, and it does not survive. We Round-Tripped One Paragraph Through 20 Languages is the ranking Klingon's 0.441 is measured against. Words That Survive Translation Perfectly explains why a small closed vocabulary is exactly the wrong thing to translate into.