I completely agree with SuStel about “empress”. {voDleH be’} looks like “the emperor’s woman/the woman of the emperor”. {be’ voDleH} looks like “the woman’s emperor/the emperor of the woman”, like maybe women have a different emperor than men do? One is the “man’s emperor” and the other is the “woman’s emperor”?
Klingons don’t have a separate word for female warriors, yet there are obviously female warriors.
Ditto for ambassadors, captains, or any other occupation/rank title.
If you want to stress that an emperor is female, you need to describe it in contextually linked statements. You can’t compress that into a single noun phrase in Klingon by any means I know.
Basically, if you’ve done whatever it takes to be emperor, your sexual gender is less important to people than your rank.
And if the gender of the emperor is really important to you, it becomes important for you to know the emperor very personally, because inappropriate comments or gestures could have undesirable consequences.
If we ever get a female president, she won’t be a *presidentress*. She’ll be a president. This is like that.
No, this is different. Warrior, ambassador, captain, and president are all gender-neutral words in English. An Emperor is male and an empress is female. When we are given two words for emperor in Klingon, it is not automatically the case that those words also mean empress.
Qa'yIn asked what I would do to translate empress,
and that's the question I answered. I didn't answer what I think
the correct answer is, because I don't know. The words might be
gender neutral, and Okrand simply failed to consider including the
feminine translation. There might be different words for empress.
There might be a modification of the word for emperor to
get empress. We have reason to believe that political
authority is limited by gender in some ways, and we have reason to
believe that the concept of an empress is not unknown to Klingons.
We do not know anything about whether Klingons deem the rank more
important than the gender.
-- SuStel http://trimboli.name