Why are Vulcan speakers always overdubbed?

This has been bugging me lately. Whenever anyone in any Trek movie speaks Vulcan, they're actually speaking English on the set, and Vulcan words are overdubbed later. Is there any particular reason WHY they always did that?

I mean, it's never done with any other language (Klingon, for example, is always spoken 'live'), so why single out Vulcan?

 

Faster to do voiceovers with someone trained to spout something that sounds like an authentic language? Look at the penultimate episode of TNG and how nobody can get their act together to say "hasperat" -- while one line of reasoning can explain that away, and other is more direct - the actors said it the way they wanted and not what the director was hoping for.

Or the actual actors - and I could have swoarn it was Alley and Nimoy - did the voiceovers since it it's easier to re-dub an audio track than to redo the same with anywhere between 1 and 10000000000 retakes, which is a bleepton of film negative to have to process and diddle with too.

That said, Trek III and VI both swim in the deep end with the newly-made Klingon language, and for III onwards they did make a proper canonical language (which II did not have?)... by then, actors found it easier to pronounce the shiny new language - I really don't know why the one scene in II was done the way it was.

 

It wasn't just that one scene (with Spock and Saavik in the torpedo room). It's also done in TMP (when Spock is undergoing kolinahr) and ST III (when Saavik speaks to young Spock on the Genesis planet).

Like I said, whenever anybody in any Trek movie speaks the Vulcan language, they're speaking English on set and Vulcan words are overdubbed later. With no other alien language do they do this. I just wondered why they were singling out Vulcan the way they did.

I mean, if they're going to bother making alien-sounding Vulcan words at all...why don't they just say them live, while filming?

 

What about Klingon? Are they always speaking Klingonese themselves?

 

Yep.

 

At this point in sci-fi and fantasy cinema history, I don't know how commonplace it was for made-up languages to actually be spoken on set. As a comparison, Greedo's dialog and voice in Star Wars were formulated and dubbed in after filming.

For TMP, I think it was easier to come up with the Klingon dialog to be spoken on set because there were only a few very, very short lines in that scene. James Doohan came up with the Klingon words, and Mark Lenard spoke them. But the dialog on Vulcan was more extensive. According to behind-the-scenes anecdotes, the Vulcan scene was intended to be in English in the first place, but then, after the fact, production staff did not like the way the scene played/sounded in English, so Roddenberry had the idea to dub in a new language for the Vulcans, seeing as how they already had the Klingons speaking their own language. So UCLA linguistics professor Hartmut Scharfe (who also developed dialog for the Klingon scene, but his work ended up not being used there) came up with alien-sounding lines to match up with the movements of the actors' mouths. Some accounts claim that Doohan came up with the Vulcan dialog, but that seems unlikely.

And then the same thing was done for the Vulcan dialog in TWOK. But this time it was a different linguist named Marc Okrand who was involved. Okrand's story is that Spock and Saavik's dialog was filmed in English, but then after the fact it was decided that they should be speaking in their own language instead. So he did something similar, coming up with alien-sounding gibberish that would seem like it matched the actors' mouth movements. And Alley and Nimoy recorded this alien dialog to be dubbed into the scene.

When it came time to work on the next movie, Okrand was brought back to come up with a working Klingon language and coach the actors to actually speak their lines in that language on set.

Kor

 

I am well aware that there is no 'real' Vulcan language like there is with Klingon, but why would this make a difference on the set? If they have to invent gibberish anyway (to overdub), why can't they invent gibberish to do 'live'?

 

They didn't decide those conversations shouldn't be in English until after they filmed them.

 

I can buy this happening in one film, but three?

 

Even as a child you could notice the audio was overdubbed for these scenes, especially in TMP where the Vulcan priestess is talking about Spock's "human half" (dubbed human blood).

 

She was referring to his childhood battle with whooping cough, actually.

 

There was also Klingon edition of Hamlet as well, I believe. And doesn't someone or other in Trekkies mention a Klingon translation of the Bible being in the works?

And then in The Simpsons you have Comic Book Guy mention that his college thesis was translating The Lord of the Rings into Klingon.