ABSTRACT
Translanguaging intercultural communication is only at its beginning. As a ground-breaking new way of understanding language and communication, translanguaging refers to the dynamic meaning-making process whereby multilingual speakers go beyond conventional divides between named languages and between modalities to act, to know and to be (Garcia and Li 2014). In this chapter, the authors outline the origins and development of the notion and discuss how it helps to further our understanding of intercultural communication, and then review critical issues and topics that have emerged in recent years. The ‘trans-’ in translanguaging challenges the lingual bias and the deficit/difference model still prevalent in intercultural communication research. It leads us away from a focus on ‘languages’ as distinct codes to a focus on the agency of individuals engaged in creating, deploying, and interpreting signs for communication. It also gives us a new perspective on conducting language-related research as it urges us to transcend the boundaries between socially constructed language systems and structures and between language and other cognitive and semiotic systems, as well as the divides between linguistics, psychology, and communication.
