Translanguaging Trails: Tracing a Multilingual Writer's Repertoire‐in‐Motion Across Digital Platforms

Multilingual writers increasingly build meaning across digital platforms, yet translanguaging research has largely observed one space, on one platform, at a time. How meaning travels between those sites, and what that movement makes possible, remains difficult to see. A multilingual speaker in Melbourne sets out to translate collective storytelling into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese for an academic presentation. Over two weeks, she works across Word documents, KakaoTalk, email, and WhatsApp, drawing on her character‐based literacy and three language networks. A Chinese semantic distinction shapes how she reads her Korean options, and a Korean concept seeds her Japanese formulation, so the translation she settles on takes shape across all four platforms. We offer translanguaging trails as a way of seeing this: the path a writer's repertoire takes across tools, languages, and interlocutors over time, the line that connects otherwise separate sites and becomes visible only across them. We propose repertoire‐in‐motion as the mechanism behind them: the unitary repertoire moves with the speaker, gathering resources at each stop, taking on the texture of each tool, and carrying insights forward. The framing helps scholars and educators see multilingual digital writing as a connected ecology rather than a sequence of bounded interactions, and the method, combining space‐centred systematic observation with multi‐sited ethnography, discourse‐centred online ethnography, and collaborative autoethnography, lets researchers trace trails elsewhere. What a single‐site vantage cannot keep in view is what a multilingual writer does across platforms within one task, and this is precisely what trails makes visible.