On Sun, 2 May 2021 at 23:10, SuStel <sustel@trimboli.name> wrote:

Transporter and transport are synonymous in this context, and the Klingons say transport in Star Trek III. There's no error here. Okrand was just going along with the terminology of the movie he made the dictionary for.

I agree that this isn't an error, so much as two alternative terms, one of which is (or has become) much more popular than the other. Maybe at the time that TKD was written, "transport beam" and "transport room" were still in somewhat common use, but if I bet if you ask any Star Trek fan today what the "correct" terminology is, almost everyone would say "transporter beam" and "transporter room".

If you search chakoteya.net (one of the most popular Star Trek transcript repositories), there are 2 instances of "transport beam" vs. 57 of "transporter beam", and 1 instance of "transport room" vs. 333 of "transporter room". Clearly, the "transporter" variants of these terms are by far more common.

In Google Books Ngram viewer (not restricted to Star Trek), "transporter beam" has been winning out over "transport beam", and ditto for "room":

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transport+beam%2C+transporter+beam&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctransport%20beam%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctransporter%20beam%3B%2Cc0

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=transport+room%2Ctransporter+room&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctransport%20room%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Ctransporter%20room%3B%2Cc0

(Before Star Trek, the terms had been used in civil and electrical engineering.)

I also found an instance on the Klingon CD (in the language lab) of Marc Okrand saying "The Klingon word for transporter beam is {jol}."

https://youtu.be/Bjp9t85pEr0?t=13

So it seems that, after TKD (2ed. in 1992, but the {jol} words appear unchanged from the original 1985 edition), even Dr. Okrand switched to using the "transporter" variant consistently (Power Klingon [1993], Klingon CD [1996], Bird-Of-Prey poster [1998]). It's not an error, but it is somewhat of an anachronism to preserve the "transport" variants as the default definitions. It's basically a stylistic choice, I suppose.

De'vID