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“Ni tayli,” Jango declared. “An'jate sa ca'nar'adate jorhaa'i gar joha bal ba'viini ti pakod Mando'a miite. G'ar'tayli: urc'miite, ba'slane, gedet'ye bal vor'entye, aliit miite sa vod bal ad, gaise be besbe, orite—ga'ru baj'hibi kote teh ga'riduur, 'lek? Ret gar balyc tayli ori'Mando osik. A nu gar li'suvarir ani tomiitese. Jorbe gar moti ogir ti tenn uram sa di'kut.”
Hmm. Mando was obvious, and Obi-Wan knew vod (brother) and kote (glory) from his time with the clones. Gedet'ye and vor'entye were please and thank you, respectively. Aliit and ad… that was clan and child, right? Obi-Wan had heard those ones before. He’d also heard di’kut, but couldn’t remember what it meant. The rest was Greek to him.
Obi-Wan whipped out his Mando’a-Basic pocket dictionary and thumbed through it.
After a long silence, Jango said, “Tion sur'eyi tionir yust at oshokita?”
Obi-Wan blinked at him owlishly, then flipped to the “T” section.
Jango sighed. “What are you doing?” he repeated, pointedly, in Basic.
“My Mando'a is a bit rusty,” Obi-Wan admitted sheepishly. “Could you repeat what you said the first time around? I only got about halfway through translating.”
Jango pinched his nose. "Jetiise,” he muttered to himself. Well, that one was easy.
“Look, if you’d just give me a moment, I assure you I’ll understand what you said in no time.”
“Oyula'a sha kyr,” Jango said testily. “Tio'nu ru surhi gai?”
Obi-Wan gave Jango a blank stare. Jango pointed at the end notes.
“Oh, I see! Yes, that is very helpful, thank you. Just give me a moment to catch up.”
Obi-Wan began to read the provided translations.
Halfway through, he stopped, scrolled back up, and said, “Cody is not my boyfriend!”
“Ru hoda ni,” Jango said.
Obi-Wan trotted to the bottom of the page. It was a challenge to parse the sea of quotations in the notes, but with some searching, he picked out what Jango had said and read the translation. Then, it was back to where he left off. He scrolled up the page, skimming the text backwards in search of his place, trying to read as little as possible for fear of spoilers. Still, it was impossible not to retain some of what he saw. Questions swirled in his mind: was learning Mando'a really that simple? What did agglutinative mean? And how did the Unabomber fit into all of it?
Obi-Wan somehow managed to overshoot his destination by a few paragraphs. By the time he relocated his place, he had forgotten what Jango had said to provoke him. He cut his losses and marched back to the end notes to finish out his back-reading.
“I already know how to ask for the restroom in Mando'a,” Obi-Wan told Jango once he was done.
“Veman,” Jango drawled.
Obi-Wan trekked to the notes. It was getting to be tiresome. This time, on the return trip, he scrolled as quickly as possible to the top of the page, then skimmed the text until he found where he’d left off. It was faster, but not by as much as he would’ve liked.
“Yes, really,” he said eloquently.
Given how much work even understanding Jango was, Obi-Wan probably should have said more, but before he could elaborate Jango replied, “Ke tengaana ni.”
Obi-Wan slogged to the notes and found what Jango had said. Halfway through the return trip, he doubled back and reread Jango’s barb about the pocket dictionary.
“‘...Tionir yust at oshokita’?” Obi-Wan said.
“N'or'am'atin'la.”
Obi-Wan squinted. “Is that a real word?”
“'Lek.”
Happily, Obi-Wan remembered that one, so he didn’t have to odyssey to the notes. “Are you sure you’re not taking any liberties with these translations? They just don’t seem especially literal.”
“Ni ru gotal’u,” Jango admitted. “R'enteyo. Tion gar haa'tayli an'ohaa be Mando'a? Orikih! Nu ru gotal’u par jorhaa'ir be seri’miit'gaan'yc an'gycese. Li'sirbur ‘gaan'au’ a nu miite sentence!”
“Of course they’ll know!” Obi-Wan replied. “It’s obvious that you’re Mandalorian just looking at you!”
Jango’s face twisted in bewilderment.
“Wait, no, that’s not right.” Obi-Wan had accidentally scrolled too far into the endnotes and responded to the wrong translation. “My apologies; it seems that I got mixed up. If you’ll give me a moment…”
“Shuk'yc,” Jango said.
“No, I suppose not,” Obi-Wan said about thirty seconds later. “Perhaps this would be easier if we used numbered footnotes.”
A thoughtful look crossed Jango’s face. He nodded. “S’ibac?” 1
It… wasn’t all that much easier, actually. Sure, it was less of a pain to navigate the notes, but it did nothing to ease the process of returning to where he’d left off.
“It’ll do,” Obi-Wan said sourly. “Now, what were you saying?”
“Tio'nu li'sur'eyir sha kyr?” 2
Obi-Wan would have to change his approach. His first thought was to mark his place by highlighting the line he had to translate with his cursor. The long scroll back and forth was still rather obnoxious, but this strategy did at least save him from blindly scanning the text for his place, much like the superscript numbers had.
“Why do you think we’ve begun numbering your lines?” Obi-Wan pointed out. “Unless you want to stand here while I spend the next minute searching for the right translation…”
Jango grimaced. “Serim. Ru sirbu meg jorcu Mando'a gana bi'kisol miite, n'enteyo borarir rud palone; nu lise ratiin sirbur shi meg copaani. Jor'bic ni tomiites'ami ra gotal'u evaar'la miite." 3
Obi-Wan had a better idea: he duplicated his tab, and in the second tab he scrolled to the proper place in the notes. Once he’d read the translation, he returned to his first tab and picked up right where he’d left off!
Problems solved, Obi-Wan cheerfully told Jango, “Sounds like an awful lot of work.”
“Nu bi'dush. Mando'a get'agiluunatyc." 4
Obi-Wan returned to his second tab, only to discover that it had refreshed while he was away, sending him back to the top of the page. Reminded himself the entire way that understanding what Jango’s words meant was worth the effort, he made the long and perilous journey back to the end notes.
When Obi-Wan tabbed back to their conversation, the page had refreshed. He spent the scroll back to his place trying not to scream.
“Not going to elaborate on ‘agglutinative’?” he said lightly.
“Chaklamiit.” 5
At last, a truly good idea came to Obi-Wan: CTRL-F. With a flourish, he brought up the ‘find on page’ toolbar, into which he gleefully typed “5”. The click of a button brought him directly to the translation, and another click returned him to the text! It was perfect! It was…
Okay, it was still a hassle. Maybe Obi-Wan was just lazy.
“Times like this, one truly feels the limits of one’s medium,” he lamented with a sigh. “If this were a film, we could just subtitle you and call it a day. Subtitles. What I wouldn’t give for the ability to do subtitles.”
“Ni shi surhi dubse,” 6 Jango offered.
“Sadly, there’s no entirely frictionless way to represent untranslated speech in our purely text-based medium,” Obi-Wan continued without stepping off his soapbox to check what Jango had said. He had no desire to lose his train of thought. “Including language foreign to the intended reader, even with translations, may reduce legibility, while omitting it may compromise the story’s vividness and character. We cannot eat our cake and have it too, as it were.”
“Tion ibace miite be Unabomber?” 7
Obi-Wan didn’t need to check the notes to guess Jango’s gist. “I just don’t think that the Unabomber recognizing that ‘have your cake and eat it too’ is a poorly-constructed idiom should ruin it for the rest of us.”
Fett waved a dismissive hand. “Ke'nu baati," 8 he said. “Mhi gana ori'ruyot. Ni r'udesii o'r kaysh vheh’yaim bal mhi ru me'dinui kade. Nuhure." 9
Obi-Wan smiled and nodded along, unable to be assed to figure out what any of that meant. “That’s great,” he said. “Tell you what: why don’t we try linking the footnotes? You can include a hyperlink that takes me to the translation, and then another link there that sends me right back where I left off!”
Jango frowned. “Nu ni kar'tayli HTML." 10
“Ah.” Obi-Wan pursed his lips. “Maybe we could put a Mando’a glossary at the end, and I’ll double check any words I don’t already know. It might even be more educational that way.”
Jango’s frown deepened. “Dush mird.”
Sure enough, those words were in the glossary. “Yes, just like that!”
“N'urmankala megin ibic cuy jate par solus miite, a n'ibice munit…'lek, ibic ori'doshishya.”
By the time Obi-Wan had gotten through that sentence, his head was beginning to hurt, and he had to agree. Clearly, he had overestimated his Mando’a vocabulary. “How about sorting the glossary in order of appearance?”
“Iba'cuy shi maan yust a shebs.”
“I suppose this solution is really only suitable for much more limited uses of the language,” Obi-Wan conceded. “It may be best to do away with the bottom of the page entirely. I know: tooltips!”
Jango ran a hand over his face.
“They’re those little boxes that appear when you hover over text with your mouse. That would be a rather elegant solution to all this, wouldn’t you agree? Try it!”
"Ibic shu'shuk," Jango said.
Obi-Wan frowned. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Nu ni kar'tayli CSS!”
“It’s alright. Hovertext never works quite right on mobile, anyhow.”
“Tion g’ar'tayli? Wer'cuy. Nariti Oyula'a juaa'ner johaa. Tion briikase?” Jango said. You know what? Forget it. I’ll put the Basic translation next to my dialogue. Happy?
“It’s a little clunky,” Obi-Wan equivocated.
Jango raised his eyebrows. “Tion urakto'shya vasor?” Clunkier than before?
“Well, no. But if the Basic translation is going to be in the main body of the text anyway, why not just say your dialogue in Mando’a?”
“Ni vaabi'bac, utreekov.” Jango said. That’s what I’m do—
“No, I mean, use ‘said in Mando'a’ as a dialogue tag. That way we don’t have to go through this whole song and dance of translating and repeating ourselves and whatnot.”
Jango shook his head. “Nu draar.” No way. “Pirimmu Mando'a nuhure.” Using Mando'a is fun.
“For you, maybe,” Obi-Wan grumbled.
“Bal tion'd'ashi anade ven kar’tayli ner johaa jate?” And how else will everyone know that I can speak it?
“By…talking to you?”
“Nayc,” Jango said firmly. No. “Nu gar tayli.” You don’t get it. “‘Mando'a’ o’Resol'nare.” ‘Our language’ is in the Resol’nare. “Enteyo nari Resol'nare.” I have to uphold the Resol'nare. “Tion gar sirbu” Are you saying “ke'nu nari” not to uphold “Resol'nare” the Resol'nare?
“I just find having the Basic and Mando'a next to each other a bit redundant.”
“Nu baat.” Don’t care.
“Especially when you won’t even gloss Resol'nare.”
“Nu lise tatugir ‘Resol'nare’ ti joh'aruetyc bal gar kar'tayli!” Jango spat. ‘Resol’nare’ (lit. Six Actions; the tenets of Mandalorian life) is untranslatable and you know it!
Obi-Wan raised his hands. “Alright. But with the Basic right there, I doubt that anyone is actually reading your Mando'a dialogue.”
Jango scowled and crossed his arms.
“Just humor me, will you?” Obi-Wan pleaded.
Jango sulked. Obi-Wan waited.
“This is stupid,” Jango said at last in Mando'a. “Why should I have to accommodate you aruetiise?”
Obi-Wan opened his mouth to ask—
“Traitors foreigners and outsiders go fuck yourself,” Jango hissed in Mando'a without missing a beat. “If you want to understand me so badly, you should learn my language.”
Obi-Wan blinked at him innocently. “But what would I use it for?”
“This fucking conversation!” Jango cried, still in Mando’a. “Mando'a is a very approachable language, okay? It was designed not to have any of the shit that trips up native Basic speakers: there’s no gender, no agreement, no case, barely any conjugation or even irregularity, and it has subject-verb-object word order. Not even the phonology is different from Basic! At least Sindarin has consonant mutation. If there were anything like that in Mando’a, maybe you’d have an excuse not to have even been trying to understand me, but…”
Jango fell silent. He stared off into the distance, eyes brightening as awe washed over him.
“I didn’t have to make up some word for phonology,” he said, amazed, in Mando'a.
“I know,” Obi-Wan said.
“I didn’t have to make up some word for some.”
“I know!”
Jango sounded like he was about to burst into tears. “I can just… say things. Without having to make compromises for Mando’a’s limited vocabulary and grammar.”
“And I can understand you so easily! Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Yes!” Jango cried in Mando'a. “Why didn’t we do this the whole time? This is—”
Jango paused. Then he frowned and tilted his head in thought.
“This isn’t as cool,” he said in Mando'a.
“Please don’t,” Obi-Wan said.
It was too late: Jango’s uncertainty evaporated. Mind made up, he proclaimed, “Nu jatis ures Mando'a.”
Obi-Wan put his head in his hands.
“N'eparavu takisit,” Jango added.
“That’s your decision, then?” Obi-Wan said wearily. Jango’s logic was, unfortunately, ironclad.
“'Lek,” he said. “Meh nu jorhaa'i Mando'a, naasade ve'nakar'mi ni Mando.”
“…I really should have seen this coming.”
Jango patted Obi-Wan’s shoulder reassuringly. “An'jate. Mhi ori'gebi'shya bah kyr jii.”
With a deep breath, Obi-Wan summoned the strength to check the endnotes for a translation. True to Jango’s word, it was much easier now. Thank goodness this was almost over.
“Fine. This will do for the rest of our conversation. Now: do you remember what we were meant to be talking about?”
Uncertainty flashed across Jango’s face. He snuck a peek at the notes.
“Try the summary?” Obi-Wan suggested.
Jango glared at Obi-Wan but did as he was told. “…Burun.”
“What about it?”
Jango shrugged.
“Oh, forget it,” Obi-Wan said.
Thus ended their conversation, if you could call it that.
As Obi-Wan scrolled past the end notes on his way to comment that this had been a perfectly odious waste of twenty minutes, he saw something that made him do a double take. He raced back up the page and burst into the body of the text, where he had left Jango.
“You fucked the Unabomber?” Obi-Wan said.