As part of the multilingual turn, translanguaging is “an approach to the use of language, bilingualism and the education of bilinguals that considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language... [ view full abstract ]
As part of the multilingual turn, translanguaging is “an approach to the use of language, bilingualism and the education of bilinguals that considers the language practices of bilinguals not as two autonomous language systems as has been traditionally the case, but as one linguistic repertoire with features that have been societally constructed as belonging to two separate languages” (García & Li 2014: 2). In order to pinpoint the dynamic interplay among multilingual resources in shop signs and brand styling, translanguaging has been introduced as an approach to multilingualism in LLS studies (Gorter & Cenoz 2015).
Taking a photo-studio brand named Naive Blue (天真蓝) as a case study, this article draws on the notion of audience design (Bell 1996; 2001) in order to analyze translanguaging as stylistic strategies for commercial purposes in the era of globalization. Photographic documentation, naturalistic online-offline observation and interviews with the studio owner were used as methods of data collection. Synthesizing multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996), indexical anlaysis (Silverstein 2003; Agha 2007) and intertexual analysis (Fairclough 2003), the study finds that translanguaging has been mobilized as generative and interactive strategies of consumer design in the brand logo, shop signs and social media promotional practices.
First, translanguaging practices help construct a discursive world not available in monolingual uses of either English or Chinese and position the brand’s target consumers as self-assertive, individualistic, and sharing a taste of distinction. Second, translanguaging is a naturalized and metalinguistically conscious component of communicative repertoires (expected to be) shared by both the brand’s social-media content manager and his interactants and followers in general. The findings also suggest that translanguaging is part of an emergent register indexing an emergent social class that is tentatively labeled as ‘young urban elites’ in contemporary China. Those young urban elites tend to (1) share higher education experiences and pursue job opportunities in urban, especially cosmopolitan, China, (2) have a relatively proficient command of bi-/multilingual sociolinguistic repertoires and are motivated to enrich them through informal learning (Dong 2013), and (3) aspire for a consumption style that embraces individualism, self-assertiveness and a taste of distinction.
