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A Milton Keynes man has revealed how translating "Klingon" has helped him deal with dyslexia.

Jonathan Brown, 50, of Furzton spent 12 years learning the fictional language of the alien race from Star Trek films.

Then, after being appointed as the lead "linguist" on a CD for others wanting to learn it, he found a different way of dealing with words.

He said: "It helped me identify my problem and found a way of working with my dyslexia."

Their language was invented by Marc Okrand, for use in some of the films.

But rather than just inventing a few words to make them sound alien, he devised a complete language, with its own vocabulary, grammar, and usage.

Mr Brown, who is married with two children, said that he always loved the original TV series and first became interested in the language after discovering there was a Klingon dictionary.

"I had to buy it just to see what was going on. Then reading it and learning it, it was just so much fun.

"There are no niceties in Klingon, I think that's why a lot of people like it, it's very straightforward."

Translated scripts

A member of the Klingon Language Institute, he translated all the scripts for the CD and was then involved in the recordings.

He explained how he has always had difficulty with reading and also has what he describes as "name blindness" but while doing this work he realised that he could use a different part of his brain.

"Dyslexia is not something you get over, you live with it. It's not necessarily a hindrance, you just learn different ways to pick things up.

"Working on the translation has helped me understand where I've been having problems all my life with languages, I realised I'd been trying to remember the words in the name part of my brain and because I can't remember names, I can't remember the words.

"With the Klingon language games used on the CD, I tended to put words into a different place and it went into my long term memory.

"I've still got a long way to go to speak it fluently, but there are many people who do."