Navigating digital repertoires: translingual practices in smartphone communication across platforms
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: • The article shows how individuals manage communicative multitasking on smartphones using translingual resources. • Under continuous mobile connectivity, semiotic diversity emerges as a condensed and dynamic temporal phenomenon. • The article frames smartphones as translanguaging spaces, analysing them through the lens of semiotic contrast. • Drawing on authentic smartphone screen recordings, the paper traces how participants navigate mobile repertoires. This article explores how individuals navigate communicative multitasking in smartphone-mediated environments by drawing on translingual and multimodal resources across distinct digital scenarios. Based on empirical data from the Texting in Time (TEXTiT) research project—including smartphone screen recordings and interviews from German and Swiss contexts—we examine how communicative repertoires are enacted in temporally compressed and socially differentiated ways. Conceptualising the smartphone as a translanguaging space, we analyse how semiotic contrasts emerge through platform use, message composition, and interactional routines. Two qualitative case studies illustrate how users manage concurrent interactional threads, repurpose multimodal sign forms such as selfies with context-specific framings, and shift between multimodal registers and media channels. These practices reflect both collaborative identity work and fluid re-positioning across overlapping communicative contexts. Our findings suggest that mobile communication involves a constant recalibration of social alignment and participation, shaped by platform affordances and social expectations. By foregrounding semiotic contrast as an analytical lens, this article offers a framework for understanding meaning-making in accelerated polymedia environments.
Source: Discourse Context & Media
Authors: Florian Busch, Jasmin Lallo, Julie Täge
Institution: University of Bern
Language: English
Subfield: Human-Computer Interaction
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,770
OpenAlex ID: W4415478785