Re: CONLANG Digest - 20 Oct 2003 to 21 Oct 2003 (#2003-297)

On 22 Oct 2003 at 18:21, Christopher Wright wrote:

> Paul Bennett palsalge
> >There was one among our number who was called upon to be a
> >professional linguist for a major motion picture (Blade II), but
> >there was a massive discrepancy between the two sides on the amount
> >of pay that would be fair, and the vampires in the film in question
> >ended up talking "subtitled gibberish" instead.
>
> How much was the conlanger asking? Tens of thousands of dollars?
>
> Since many languages are copylefted, they could have used any of those. They
> could have easily made a language themselves. A quality replacement product
> would have been cheap; thus, the price for a commissioned work would also be
> low.
Mine is not really the place for divulging all the details, but
basically, there was a vampire language created for "Blade", but the
creator died without leaving conspicuous notes. The only surviving
corpus of the language was that portion of it which survived in the
script. The job of the conlanger was to take the script of "Blade"
and reconstruct the underlying conlang, so that the relevant dialog
for "Blade II" (which was much more copious) could be given in a
universe-consistent and fanboy-appeasing way.

This was no easy task, and led to many many hours of work to get it
"just right". I don't recall whether the project actually included
translating the dialog for the second film, but I suspect it would
have. The conlanger felt they ought to be renumerated as any other
PhD-type consultant and/or professional translator doing an
equivalent amount of work (maybe $100 p/h, as I recall, but it was a
long time ago), and the studio felt that a "token" fee of IIRC $50
was sufficient. This was not fair, and a clear case of the studio
trying to rip the conlanger off, or at least being not willing to
admit the amount of work involved. Thus, a mutual decision was
reached that the studio could go whistle for the language, or
something to that effect.

I have probably mis-stated or mis-remembered a large portion of the
specific facts, but I leave it up to the original conlanger to fill
in the details accurately, if they so wish.





Paul