Just saw the Dune: Part 2. What do you think of the empire and fremen languages seen on screen?
I wish they would have let us do something ourselves for the Harkonnens (we could've created a badass Harkonnen language), but we certainly can't complain, given how much screen time our Fremen language got. We translated and delivered over 500 lines of dialogue for Dune: Part Two, and MOST of it ended up on screen. That is absolutely astonishing for a film. I invite you to go through the dialogue for previous films I've worked on—including Dune: Part One—and add up all the lines we've translated, and then see how much of it ended up on screen:
There's more Castithan in Defiance than language work in all the other movies I've worked on combined. For films, in general, they ask for little and use less, and err on the side of not subtitling where possible. Dune: Part Two is extraordinary in the amount of conlang dialogue that actually appears on screen. The only thing to compare it to, honestly, is Avatar (the first one, not the second, where they decided everyone should just speak English most of the time, which is lame).
So, yeah, Jessie and I were very pleased.
Oh, and by the way, those who follow my Tumblr may remember how disappointed we were that only I was credited on Pixar's Elemental, despite the fact that my wife Jessie and I worked together to create that language. Not so with Dune: Part Two! We are both credited. Furthermore, they really treated us right—especially Jessie, as she didn't work on the first film with me. I'd understand if they were a bit hesitant, given the fact she wasn't there for part one, but they welcomed her, treated her as part of the team, credited us both, and even credited her as Jessie Peterson, despite the fact that she hadn't yet changed her name (we were engaged but not married when the credit roll was locked).
And, let me tell you, Jessie was responsible for most of the brilliant semantic work that went into translation for this second film. We've done a lot of press of late, and we often get asked what are interesting words/idioms we've come up with, and every time we find one, invariably, it was Jessie who came up with it. I may have come up with the flesh and bones of Chakobsa, but Jessie gave it the heart that pumps its blood.
