Translingualism

Translingual phenomena are words and other aspects of language that are relevant in more than one language. Thus "translingual" may mean "existing in multiple languages" or "having the same meaning in many languages"; and sometimes "containing words of multiple languages" or "operating between different languages". Translingualism is the phenomenon of translingually relevant aspects of language; a translingualism is an instance thereof. 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". Internationalisms offer many examples of translingual vocabulary. For example, international scientific vocabulary comprises thousands of translingual words and combining forms.

The term also refers to a pedagogical movement and line of research inquiry in composition studies and second-language learning that seek to normalize the simultaneous presence of multiple languages and communicative codes as well as characterize all language use as a matter of mixing and changing these languages and codes.^[1] For these teachers and language researchers, the prefix trans in translanguaging "indexes a way of looking at communicative practices as transcending autonomous languages".^[2] This prefix provides a different lens of looking at languages and the relationships among them. Rather than considering each language as fixed and closed, a translanguaging perspective considers languages as flexible resources that speakers and writers use to communicate across cultural, linguistic, or contextual boundaries.