After earning a Ph.D. in linguistics, Marc Okrand took a job at the National Captioning Institute, where he worked on the first closed-captioning system for hearing impaired television viewers. While coordinating closed captioning for the Oscars award show in 1982, Mr. Okrand met the producer for the movie "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan." That led to a twist in his career: He was hired to create the Vulcan language and, later, the Klingon dialogue. Mr. Okrand has since expanded his work on Star Trek languages into several books, including The Klingon Dictionary.

Full name: Marc Okrand

Age: 60

Hometown: Los Angeles

Current position: Director of live captioning, National Captioning Institute

First job: Radio DJ

Favorite job: This one

Education: B.A., University of California, Santa Cruz; Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Years in the industry: 30

How I got to here in 10 words or less: I kept an open mind.

Q.Before joining the National Captioning Institute, what did you do?

A. I taught linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara before taking a post doctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., in 1978. I researched a couple of California Indian languages that haven't been spoken in a long time. The last native speaker had died long ago so relearning it was mostly based on documents.

Q.How did you figure out how to properly pronounce the words?