How do people make up languages for films/books? Do they go through a dictionary word by word and make up a translation for each one? Or is it more of a pig-Latin type process?
In: Culture
That strongly depends on how competent or ambitious said writer is. Sometimes they actually hire a linguist to help construct their languages and make an actual consistent language from the ground up – with vocabulary, grammar, and idioms to fit a real language. Often this constructed language goes far beyond what actually appears in the work it features in, but it helps give it an air of authenticity. Often they use a real language family as basis, but in some cases it’s made up. Tolkien, being the prolific world-builder he was, constructed [several languages to some degree](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_constructed_by_J._R._R._Tolkien). Klingon for instance is a real language you can learn. You probably won’t get much use out of it in your day to day life, but you could learn it to a good enough degree to hold a conversation.
Sometimes you just need to construct enough of the language so that your characters can speak it to the degree required for the book. That language might never have a word for “Relax”, but it might have a couple of war-related phrases for that big battle sequence.
Sometimes it’s just pig-latin esque, but that’s a bit lazy and is easily found out: language is more than just english with a 1:1 word replacement.
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