Star Wars: KotOR Interview
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Q: How do you handle alien language dialogue? Is there a true vocabulary of some kind like Klingon in Star Trek?
A: The key to recording alien dialogue is casting the right actor for the part. Over the years I've had actors take to Huttese like a fish to water, but the opposite is also true. In the past I've had to line-read (when an actor copies my performance) 150-plus Huttese lines to an actor in order to make it work. This is a very slow process. There is a true vocabulary. When Star Wars: A New Hope was in production, Ben Burtt from Skywalker Sound created the Huttese language. For many years it was locked away in his head, but recently he put together a Huttese dictionary called Star Wars: Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide: Beeps, Bleats, Boskas, and Other Common Intergalactic Verbiage. I know that Mike Gallo (the producer on Knights of the Old Republic) used the book as his bible while translating the English into Huttese.
