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Translingualism is a term used in various ways in fields like linguistics, literary studies, education, and in composition studies is used to describe a theoretical and pedagogical orientation to language difference. Translingualism broadly represents an attempt to respond to and understand language users who work across languages, as well as the actual language diversity in everyday contexts. In countering monolingual ideologies, translingualism relates to the theory and teaching of writing practices and literacy across languages.

Thus "translingual" can mean "existing in multiple languages" or "having the same meaning in many languages"; and sometimes "containing words of multiple languages" or "operating among different languages." The word comes from trans-, meaning "across", and lingual, meaning "having to do with languages (tongues)"; thus, it means "across tongues", that is, "across languages". According to Suresh Canagarajah, the prefix Trans in Translanguaging "indexes a way of looking at communicative practices as transcending autonomous languages"(31). This prefix provides a different lens of looking at languages and the relationships among them. Rather than considering each language as fixed and closed, translingualism considers languages as fluid and open so that a speaker may use spatiotemporal resources to communicate.

The translingual model of language offers a different perspective from monolingual and multilingual models in how it defines language, fluency, standards, and the ends and means of communication. Translingualism is a move toward a more hybrid and fluid approach to language. It shifts from a more target-based prescriptive approach to language, to a more practice-based descriptive approach. Translingual practices challenge dominant language standards and norms. There are many examples of translingual practices in everyday and academic life, as well as in multimodal contexts. Translingualism has been debated by scholars in linguistics, second-language writing, and within composition studies itself, focusing particularly on definitions of language and multilingualism, power and social justice, and language difference in practice.

Overview
Translingualism offers a way for monolingual and multilingual writers and speakers to think differently about their approaches to language difference. Translingualism forwards the idea that language emerges from everyday practice, as language users move across (trans-) languages (lingual). Language standards are constantly changed by everyday, ordinary language users who work within and across a wide range of fluctuating languages and language boundaries to communicate in a variety of contexts.

The translingual model of language views language boundaries as always changing, which differs from ideologies that view language as unchanging, separate, and “defined by specific forms.” Translingualism presents the knowledge and use of more than one language as a benefit and resource. In translingual theory and pedagogy, fluency is not a predefined target and is not indicative of one’s national identity or one’s standing as a so-called native or non-native speaker (for more, see "Debates"). Instead, in the translingual view, communicators constantly work on and define fluency through their interactions. Their goal is to understand one another in spoken and written contexts by using strategies such as code-switching, code-meshing, and the borrowing and blending of languages.

Language users’ everyday practices change the contexts around them and what is defined as the standard or norm in those contexts. From a translingual perspective, language practice is always an act of translation and defined by unequal power relations. Language users have the ability to change language norms by creative working in and across linguistic, generic, stylistic, and modal conventions so as to communicate effectively.

Scholars who adopt the translingual approach employ it in both research and teaching. Translingual research studies often investigate the communicative practices of students as well as writers who work within and across multiple languages, modes, genres, and media. Scholars research and teach translingual, transmodal, and transgeneric communicative practices with the goal of enabling all language users to reclaim and redefine the boundaries of language standards so as to disrupt and change the status quo [When we move to Wiki we could add a citation here for the special issue of CE that includes discussions of transmodality and transgeneric approaches.

Background
Translingualism emphasizes the meaning-making affordances of situated language use, or practice, rather than on language as a structure or system of meaning. To understand the importance of the term "practice" for translingualism, it's helpful to consider how practice and structure are interrelated terms in critical theory. For modernist projects in language and culture, such as Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics or Claude Lévi-Strauss's work on kinship and marriage in cultural anthropology, the goal of linguistic and cultural research was to describe the abstract and decontextualized structural patterns that underlie everyday experiences of language and culture. In structuralist approaches to language and culture, the structure itself is generative of an individual's cultural or linguistic behavior. Agency and meaning are thought to exist in the context of the structure, not in an individual's purposes or motives for deploying a particular cultural practice or language use in a given context at a particular moment in time. In contrast to structure, work in sociology, like Pierre Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice and poststructuralist cultural theorists like Michel Foucault, sought to emphasize the spatiotemporal and political contexts in which individuals speak and act. For these theorists, "practice" becomes a significant term, as it conveys the sense that how, when, where, and why an individual deploys a particular cultural or linguistic act in everyday situations is always purposeful and motivated. Agency and meaning exist not only in the structure or system itself, but also in how the structures and systems are used--in other words, in practice. For translingualism, practice thus indexes a shift away from linguistic structure and towards situation and the context of the moment as the primary sites for meaning-making.

Linguistics, Language Education, and Composition Studies
In research on linguistics, language education, and composition & rhetoric, translingualism has led students, teachers, and researchers to view language differences as resources for meaning-making rather than as barriers to effective communication or as deficits to language competence.

Suresh Canagarajah, for example, has shown that bilinguals and multilinguals use multiple languages simultaneously as part of their entire meaning-making repertoire to collaboratively negotiate meaning in specific communicative contexts. Likewise, Ofelia García's research on bilingual education has shown the affordances of allowing students to "translanguage." , or cross between multiple languages as part of their early language acquisition. In Horner et al.'s "Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach," dozens of composition scholars collaboratively endorse the view that translingualism is a useful orientation to student writing as well.

Although emphasizing the primacy of language use or individual practice, translingualism does address the structural aspects of language as well. A key difference between translingual theories of language structure and prior structuralist approaches is that, whereas structuralist approaches view each language as separate and bounded systems of signification, a translingual orientation views languages as fluid, open, always mixing and changing as a result of cross-language contact and negotiation.

Literary Studies
While a prolific body of research and theory on translingualism has emerged from the fields of linguistics, language education, and composition & rhetoric, one of the earlier works on translingualism was a work of literary theory, Steven Kellman's (2000) Translingual Imagination. In contrast to more contemporary approaches to translingualism--which focus more on language in everyday contexts and schooling--Kellman's approach to translingualism focuses on literary authors who compose in languages of which they are not native speakers, analyzing the cultural, historical, and political contexts that led novelists, essayists, poets, and playwrights to abandon their "Muttersprache" to write in a foreign language.

Interdisciplinarity
Because of the emphasis on movement, crossing, or "shuttling" signified by the trans- prefix, translingualism shares many interests and concerns with areas of study that focus on the migration of people and cultural practices, such as migration studies, diaspora studies, refugee studies, transnationalism, and rhetorical mobility. Thus, translingualism has been a useful orientation for some scholars to explore how language is implicated in immigration, diaspora and refugee resettlement, the formation of transnational networks, and socioeconomic and geographic mobility.

Pedagogy
Central to translingual pedagogy is a movement “to respond productively to language difference in writing.” This is counter to deficit notions of language practices among minoritized groups and their treatment– in and beyond educational contexts by authorities(e.g., teachers, policy makers) who perpetuate dominant discourses–as “cognitively deficient.” Translingual pedagogy is a shift towards an asset-based approach in which students’ home languages and cultures are understood as assets or resources for teaching and learning. This pedagogy invites students to incorporate their home languages and literacies into classrooms and educational settings, and it uses their home languages as resources and sites of inquiry. Underlying these practices is a further challenge to monolingual ideologies and policies (e.g., English-only policies) that have traditionally structured education, particularly in Anglocentric contexts. While translingual pedagogy has primarily been aimed at challenging assumptions associated with standard English, the approach can be readily applied across languages. The broader aim is to challenge and decenter dominant discourses or standards and the ways in which they function across varied communities and contexts.

Multiple approaches toward translingual pedagogy have been adapted and implemented in writing and language learning classrooms in a number of ways. One approach might be commonly associated with code meshing. An extension of the term code switching (i.e., switching between two different languages), this approach invites multilingual writers to write back to the dominant discourse by strategically incorporating their home languages and literacies into their texts. One model for this practice is Gloria Anzaldúa who, in her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, moves back and forth between varieties of Spanish and English. However, a number of other translingual approaches have also been taken up. These approaches include inviting multilingual speakers to participate in culture circles sharing linguistic and cultural practices and differences; to translate cultural terms and texts (e.g., fables) for outsiders;  ; to create children’s story books for others from different cultures; and to draw images associated with beliefs about languages (i.e., language ideologies) and what they suggest about speakers.

Translingual pedagogy further emphasizes that linguistic difference does not only happen across languages, but also within them. As such, language users in the translingual classroom are invited to share slang, dialects, and insider languages (e.g., jargon). In this fashion, translingual pedagogy is aimed at helping people to examine the links between the word and the world, or the ways in which languages are closely connected to world views.

Everyday Translingualism
The translingual approach considers how language choices work to disrupt the ideologies of Standardized Academic English (SAE*) through more obviously different approaches, as in a code-meshed text like Gloria Anzaldúa’s, but scholars also examine as well how writers employ translingualism in as texts that seem less different but are potentially just as disruptive to the status quo. See, for example, Rosina Lippi-Green's discussion of the myth of Standard American English, which she tags with an asterisk * to designate that SAE* is a construction. Interdisciplinary discussions related to everyday translingual practice sometimes refer to metropolitan, cosmopolitan, world or global Englishes, and translanguaging.

Academic Examples
Scholars including Gloria Anzaldúa, Victor Villanueva, Malea Powell, Geneva Smitherman, and Keith Gilyard have engaged explicitly with code-meshing and mixing in their academic writing. Scholars such as Min-Zhan Lu and Suresh Canagarajah and others have studied how student writers engage in repetition and difference within and across language standards and conventions.

Everyday Examples
Everyday language practices are highly contextualized within the specific times, places, and spaces in which it occurs; what is considered the norm in one context may not in another. Everyday examples of translingualism can be seen in the varieties of Spanglish spoken across South Florida in formal and informal contexts; the mixing of Spanish and English on billboards touting goods and services on highways across the United States; in the use of the phrase “Collecting Money Toilet” on a sign in China; in a graduate student’s use of Arabic and symbols in an academic literacy narrative; in the blog posts of English language learners in Japan ; and in an undergraduate student’s choice to engage in repetition rather than difference in their academic writing by using the phrase “can able to.”

Even as everyday examples of translingualism gain more traction and attention in academic and non-academic contexts, interdisciplinary scholars and everyday language users continue to fight against the raciolinguistic, monolingual ideologies that adopt a biased, prejudiced deficit-based view of everyday translingual practice. . Keith Gilyard also cautions that academic approaches to translingualism in everyday contexts need to remember to avoid “sameness-of-difference,” the idea that we are all translinguals, and so differ from the standard in the same way; everyday language users are punished differently, by virtue of our identities and contexts.

Examples of Multi- or Transmodality
The approach to difference outlined in the translingual approach refers to language difference, but the approach can be applied to multimodality as well. A transmodal approach views the multiple media and modes used for communication as fundamental, rather than peripheral, to composing processes.

Debates
Since its emergence as a subdiscipline of rhetoric and writing studies, translingualism has been implicated in several theoretical and practical debates.

Monolingualism, Multilingualism, and Translingualism
As an ideological approach to language difference, translingualism stands in opposition to the ideology of monolingualism, which treats language difference as a problem and assumes languages are fixed and distinct from one another. See, for example, Missy Watson and Rachael Shapiro's description of four strands of monolingualism. In contrast, the ideology of translingualism understands language difference in writing as a resource and sees the boundaries between languages as socially constructed, blurred, and flexible. Some scholars have also argued that translingualism represents a humane, respectful, and socially just approach toward language difference, particularly as it manifests for second-language writers.

While monolingualism presents the most obvious ideological contrast to translingualism, some translingual scholars have also critiqued “multilingualism” (a term commonly used in second-language writing and applied linguistics) as a problematic term because, these scholars argue, it maintains monolingualism’s assumptions that languages are separate and bounded.

Language Difference in Practice
Scholars in closely related fields have offered terms that overlap with translingualism in their efforts to describe what language difference looks like in practice. Although there are some differences among the terms, all come together in their efforts to resist problematic monolingual assumptions. These problematic assumptions include the premise that languages are essentially different and separate; that multilingualism interferes with literacy development; or that a high competency in languages is required to be considered multilingual. Translanguaging is a term used in applied linguistics and bilingual education to describe the use of multiple languages simultaneously. This term holds as an underlying principle that languages are interrelated and language practices are systematic.

Code-meshing is a term developed in writing studies to account for the practice of “bringing the different [linguistic] codes within the same text rather than keeping them apart.” Code-meshing is distinct from code-switching, in that the latter involves switching languages or language registers in different social situations, rather than using them together.

In addition to competing terminology and disciplinary understandings about language difference in practice, several scholars in composition studies have cautioned that cross-language work may not manifest itself in visible difference, and they have also argued that it is important not to romanticize language difference in writing.

Second-Language Writing
In the early- to mid-2010s, scholars in the subdiscipline of second-language (L2) writing (SLW) published several articles critical of translingualism as a new area in the field of rhetoric and writing studies. Matsuda (2014) cautioned scholars to resist uncritical acceptance or romanticization of translingualism. Atkinson et al (2015) argued in separate articles that, while translingualism offered valuable new perspectives for the field, it was equally important to recognize SLW’s existing work and expertise in language and applied linguistics. Canagarajah (2015) published a response to Matsuda, in which he defended the importance of translingualism as an orientation toward language practices and pedagogy.

In addition to this initial response to translingualism, SLW scholars have also cautioned against the binary that is seemingly established by the term “translingual” in opposition to “multilingual,” the latter of which is commonly used in SLW and applied linguistics.

Most recently, scholars in SLW and translingualism have begun building bridges between the two areas. Silva and Wang’s (2020) collection, Reconciling Translingualism and Second Language Writing, for example, brings together scholars to address key issues and concerns that both areas share.

Power and Social Justice
Some scholars, while acknowledging the value of translingualism in promoting linguistic social justice, have cautioned that a heightened focus on cross-language practices may blind us to the power differentials that exist for speakers and writers with identities who are marginalized in broader society. In other words, these scholars suggest that those with minority/minoritized identities may face challenges in writing or speaking across languages, especially in contexts where they hold less power. These scholars argue that such challenges must be accounted for in translingual scholarship if it is to work as a tool through which to achieve linguistic social justice.

In addition, while translingualism as ideology insists that languages’ boundaries are flexible and blurred, for speakers and writers of minority languages, maintaining separate language practices is a human right and equally important in efforts to achieve linguistic social justice. Rhetorical sovereignty has particular importance for indigenous populations and African American speakers of African American Vernacular English.