Translanguaging and Trans-Semiotizing

This chapter addresses translanguaging and trans-semiotizing as theoretical concepts and communicative practices and explores the different contextual influences of related scholarship. The 'trans' prefix has been increasingly used in discourse on globalization, and it refers to creativity and fluidity as much as to crossings. When applied to communication, the speakers/communicators constitute the focus, rather than languages. Different languages are not conceptualized to be discrete entities in themselves but are acknowledged to be social constructs and linguistic analytic descriptions. These social constructs and descriptions are commonly applied to the practices that people leverage from a larger linguistic and semiotic repertoire. In the chapter, the emergence of translanguaging and trans-semiotizing both as concepts and as specific terms to offer a dynamic process-oriented theorizing of communicative practices is discussed, and their evolution and take up according to particular goals and contexts is demonstrated. The term 'translanguaging' has strong links to pedagogy thus the chapter has a special focus on formal education, as well as on scholarship from different regions around the world.