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Volume 12 Number 2, Summer 2015, Pages 1-154   


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Translingualism in Action: Rendering the Impossible Possible

    Setiono Sugiharto


Despite the relative novelty of the notion of translingualism in literacy pedagogy, this article attempts to provide additional evidence of translingual practices drawn from a specific context (i.e., Indonesia) in order to showcase its vibrancy. It attempts to answer the following research questions: 1) How do Indonesian multilingual writers and an Indonesian artist translanguage different linguistic codes? and 2) How do the textual realizations look as a result of their translanguaging process? Two types of translanguaged texts (academic texts written by two Indonesian scholars and an artistic work) were analyzed and scrutinized. All of these sample texts were coded, interpreted, and reinterpreted in light of the available theories on translingualism. This was done in order to extract instances of translanguaged texts. Results showed that translanguaging, which occurs at both lexical and morpho-syntactical levels, is inextricably connected to the writers' identities, cultures, and rhetorical traditions. The writers' purpose of codemeshing different linguistic codes in this study is deliberate in that they tried to infuse their cultural values and traditions in English texts to produce hybrid texts. As closing remarks, implications for translanguaging in writing pedagogy are offered, and caveats for doing translanguaging are addressed.

Keywords: Translingualism, literacy pedagogy, translanguaging, codemeshing, hybrid texts