AN ANALYSIS OF WORDPLAY TRANSLATION STRATEGIES IN “ABBOTT ELEMENTARY”INDONESIAN SUBTITLES

Abstract

The growing popularity of international streaming platforms has increased the demand for effective audiovisual translation particularly in conveying humor based on wordplay. This study examined the types of wordplay found in Abbott Elementary and investigated the strategies used to translate them into Indonesian subtitles on Disney+ Hotstar. A descriptive qualitative method was employed and the data were analyzed using Delabastita’s (1996) framework of wordplay and translation strategies. The findings identified seven instances of wordplay consisting of phonological structures including homophony and paronymy lexical structures including polysemy and idiom misuse and morphological structures. The analysis revealed that Pun to Non-Pun was the most frequently applied strategy accounting for 71.4% of the data while Pun to Pun represented 28.6%. These findings suggest that subtitle translation tended to prioritize semantic clarity and readability rather than preserving the linguistic form of the original joke. The multimodal analysis further showed that visual and auditory elements often supported the delivery of humor when wordplay could not be fully retained in the target language. It can therefore be concluded that multimodality plays an important role in helping audiences understand humor and maintaining the intended comedic effect in audiovisual translation.