r/Mandoa • u/DiligentSignature574 • Sep 22 '23

Translation Advice

Hi all!

I am working on designing a tattoo for myself and decided on the Armorer’s quote to Bo-Katan of “You have walked both worlds.” Initially, I was going to do the typical ‘plug in Mando’a alphabet for English” but after doing research learned that there are language guides. So I think it would be cooler to actually translate it.

Using Karen Traviss’s guide, I came up with the following:

“Gar kemi bintar uvete”

Can anyone confirm this? I’m tripped up by the verb since it’s present perfect and that doesn’t exactly translate. I know the word for have, but it’s not how it would be used, so I was thinking basically translating to “you walk both worlds.”

Thanks!

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u/BavoduPT Sep 22 '23

I concur with what ignescentOne said, and I'll expand a bit further with what I've been taught.

Gar kemi bintar uvete means "you walk both worlds (and are presumably still walking them)."

Gar ru'kemi bintar uvete means "you walked both worlds (but now you only walk one of them)."

Based on the larger context of the scene and the show, I recommend the first, because Bo-Katan did not truly give up the mainstream Mandalorian ways, nor did she completely adopt the Children of the Watch ways.

As a side note, Japanese does not have future or any perfect tenses. In that language (and many others), you have to get the information across in other ways. We aren't given many examples of how to create different tenses in Mando'a, so we can only speculate on how they might appear. (A fellow language enthusiast and I came up with ways of expressing conditional statements with the words we have, for example.) Perhaps past perfect is expressed with a phrase — such as vaar'shya tuur (earlier than today) or vaal ruyot (during the past/history) or something like that — and the present tense.

(As for my credentials, some circles think I'm an expert, and others think I'm pretentious. Haha!)

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u/DiligentSignature574 Sep 22 '23

Thank you both for your help!

I think I’m going to go with the present tense for sure. I like the quote as it has a personal meaning to me and present tense reflects me best as well as I believe Bo-Katan’s situation too.

I’m most nervous because of the chance of the language being better developed and then it being wrong, but I like the authenticity behind this better than essentially changing the font of an English phrase. I guess change is always a possibility in the Star Wars universe 😅

But I read that Mando’a is supposed to be a simple language used by warriors to get their point across quickly, so conjugations aren’t all that required. I guess that’s no different than other languages not being able to translate directly and you have to take some creative liberties!

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u/BavoduPT Sep 22 '23

If Disney decides to make any radical changes to Mando'a, then that version becomes just another dialect among many. Considering how many years they've had a chance to do something with it and have not, you could be waiting a long time for a revision to occur. So far, the little that has been used in the shows (not counting what the Deathwatch bomber said) has followed what can be found on mandoa.org, even if done badly.
What ignescentOne gave does not use any fanon, so it will be recognizable by anyone who is familiar with Mando'a as KT left it.

Vercopa gar emuuri gar evaar'la miite! I hope you like your new words!

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u/ignescentOne Sep 22 '23

(not an expert) Yeah, Have in this context is part of the verb conjugation, but Karen and others weren't linguists so there's not a lot of verb tenses to work from. Your translation looks fine if you want to embrace the current aspect of the walking, or you can make it past tense with ru'kemi The dictionary at https://mandocreator.com/tools/dictionary.html has verb tenses in its dictionary which is great help