Translating Wordplay in A Comedy Movie: Strategies and Their Effectiveness Viewed from a Multimodal Perspective

Abstract

This descriptive qualitative research on audiovisual translation aims to
describe and analyze two elements, namely, the wordplay translation
strategies applied by the translator in Scary Movie 3 and the
effectiveness of the strategies from a multimodality perspective. Three
instruments were used in collecting data; transcription sheet, selection
sheet and category matrix. The result revealed that four strategies were
implemented in translating wordplay in this movie: wordplay
translation into non-wordplay, zero translation, wordplay translation by
borrowing the wordplay of the source language, and wordplay
translation to wordplay with a related rhetorical device. Furthermore, it
was also found that the effectiveness of the strategies was supported by
the existence of images (nonverbal visual channel (NVC)), background
sounds (nonverbal auditory channel (NAC)), dialogue (verbal auditory
channel (VAC)), and the subtitles (verbal-visual channel (VVC)). The
holistic analysis of all polysemiotic channels in the scenes show that the
characteristics of audiovisual translation does not align the
monosemiotic translation. The existence of the semiotic channels allow
the text compression in the subtitle without reducing the naration flow.