Wordplay or Not Wordplay (The Indonesian version of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland)

Abstract

Wordplay is a clever and witty way of using words, exploiting similarity in form and differences in meaning to serve some purposes, for example creating jokes. Lewis Carroll is famous for his wordplays as unique signature of his works, such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This research describes the English wordplay translation into Indonesian in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Petualangan Alice di Negeri Ajaib. The Indonesian version was translated by Maria Masniari Lubis and published by Cikal Aksara in 2013. Applying Delabatista and Leech theories on wordplay and translation technique, there are 50 wordplays analyzed. As the result, paronymy is the type of wordplay which appears the most, 15 data, while homograph does not appear at all. The most frequent technique discovered in translating wordplay is Wordplay to Non-wordplay as many as 31 times or 62% of all data. While the second preferred translation technique is Wordplay into Wordplay. In conclusion, despite a fact that wordplay is Lewis Carroll’s signature, the translation fails to produce equivalent wordplays or maintain the style of the author. Keywords—alice’s adventures in wonderland; translation; translation techniques; wordplay