Navigating Digital Repertoires: Translingual Practices in Smartphone Communication Across Platforms

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.