Translingual Practices in Global Business. A Longitudinal Study of a Professional Communicative Repertoire

This chapter draws on a longitudinal ethnographic study of a Finnish engineer’s communicative repertoire that develops in the process of professional migration. The participant first works as a factory intern in Germany, then as a project engineer and project manager in Finland, and latterly as an operations manager in China. Here, repertoire is viewed through dynamic and flexible translingual practices, in which people follow, appropriate and invent norms, combine and shuttle between languages, ways of speaking, semiotic resources and modalities in the transnational work space in order to meet, interact, make meaning and build relationships and, ultimately, do their jobs. The data selected for this chapter provide an overview of the professional’s translingual practices in speaking (face-to-face and computer-mediated) and writing at work. The analysis combines temporal and spatial dimensions and demonstrates how the professional communicative repertoire manifests itself through translingual practices, some of which remain in the repertoire over time while others change.


Introduction
This chapter focuses on the professional communicative repertoire and translingual practices of a Finnish engineer who, during a 13-year-long ethnographic study, moves along the professional migration continuum, first working as a factory intern in Germany, then in global business, first as a project engineer and project manager based in Finland, and subsequently as an operations manager based in China.The use of the professional repertoire illuminates micro-level globalisation processes in current working life and global business, where macro-level global flows, migration and the vast expansion of new technologies and economies (Appadurai's scapes, 1990(Appadurai's scapes, , 1996) ) have generated a need for new career paths, roles, and mobile and flexible repertoires (Roberts, 2010; see also Duchêne, Moyer, & Roberts, 2013).The professional repertoire manifests itself in a space for meeting, interacting and building relationships that extends beyond the physical boundaries of a workplace (e.g.Hua, 2014, pp. 238-239;Duchêne et al., 2013).These transnational work spaces constitute "ever-changing nexus [es] of activities that happen in any place" (Higgins, 2017, p. 103); they are dynamic, socially constructed, constituted by physical, social and imagined spaces (Lefebvre, 1991).In these spaces, people and languages enter into contact, mutually influencing each other and thereby creating new meanings, types of communication (Canagarajah, 2013a, p.10), knowledge and texts (Heller, 2010;Heller & Duchêne, 2016).
This chapter has empirical, theoretical and methodological aims.First, it aims to show how professionals operating globally need mobile and flexible repertoires to accomplish their varied work tasks and meet their business goals.Second, this chapter aims to illustrate how it makes sense to view the manifestation of a professional communicative repertoire through of translingual practices, that is, the varied ways a professional engages in meaning-making processes at work and simultaneously combines, separates and shifts between languages, ways of speaking, semiotic resources (see Virkkula-Räisänen, 2010;Räisänen, 2013), and modalities of communication (speaking, writing, reading, gesturing) in any one activity, such as meetings.Through combinations of and shifts between sets of resources, the individual creates meaningful distinctions in order to do his job.In the analysis of translingual practices, this chapter uses multiple methods and types of data.
In the contact zones of business (Pratt, 1991) where people do not share a common first language, English is often chosen as the lingua franca (BELF) to communicate business knowledge (Louhiala-Salminen, Mirjaliisa, & Kankaanranta, 2005;Kankaanranta & Louhiala-Salminen, 2018).Although research has already found how local languages can exist side by side with English on the corporate level (Louhiala-Salminen & Kankaanranta, 2012;Angouri, 2013;Lønsmann, 2014), it has only recently started to pay the necessary attention to workers' dynamic and flexible translingual practices (see Hua, 2014, p. 240), appropriation and invention of norms and values, and shuttling between languages (Cogo, 2016;Franceschi, 2017).In addition to languages and linguistic resources, researchers should investigate "communication as an alignment of words with many other semiotic resources involving different symbol systems (i.e., icons, images), modalities of communication (i.e., aural, oral, visual, and tactile channels), and ecologies (i.e., social and material contexts of communication" (Canagarajah, 2013c, p. 1).This chapter, then, shows how communicative success is the result of the appropriate use of semiotic resources and different modalities in local interaction for meaning-making (see also Bucholtz & Hall, 2016;Mondada, 2016;Blackledge & Creese, 2017;Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015;Pennycook, 2017), not the result of full competence and mastery of linguistic structures (as has been widely accepted in applied linguistics, for a critique see Canagarajah, 2018).BELF is a resource that is being appropriated, modified, and used in diverse ways as part of translingual practices, indexing not only activities and goal-orientedness in business but also people's identities and social relationships (Piller, 2011;Räisänen, 2013) and types of jobs and duties (Angouri & Miglbauer, 2014;Mahili, 2014).Translingual practices occur in a temporal-spatial nexus of activities, or space: individuals use their biographical repertoires (temporal dimension) in a particular activity with particular goals, at a physical place with materiality and inter-actants determining the spatial repertoire (spatial dimension).Combining the temporal and spatial dimensions in the analysis, this chapter shows how the Finnish engineer functions with multiple resources at work and how his repertoire and translingual practices change over time.

Theoretical Framework
This section presents the theoretical framework of the study and introduces the core concepts: repertoire, translingual practice and translanguaging.

Individual Repertoires and Translingual Practices
Sociolinguistic research is paying increasing attention to individuals' communicative repertoires, fluid practices and multicompetences (see Kramsch, 2009;Busch, 2012Busch, , 2016;;Blommaert & Backus, 2013;Räisänen, 2013).The concept of communicative repertoire has developed since Gumperz's (1964) notion of verbal repertoire, which was linked to a speech community.Currently, a communicative repertoire is viewed not as tied to any one specific speech community but rather as biographical and historical, reflecting an individual's trajectories of socialization and membership in various communities (Blommaert & Backus, 2013;Räisänen, 2013).A repertoire consists of a collection of communicative resources used in social situations and activities, and contributing to and drawing on spatial repertoires (Pennycook & Otsuji, 2015;Pennycook, 2017; see also Hall, Cheng, & Carlson, 2006, p. 232) in ways that are appropriate and meaningful in those situations.By deploying their resources, language users engage in meaning-making practices across linguistic and semiotic boundaries (Canagarajah, 2013b).
Naturally, people do different things when they use their repertoires; this chapter investigates what people do in working life where repertoire use can be seen as translingual practice (Canagarajah, 2013b; see also Pennycook, 2008Pennycook, , 2017)).In line with Canagarajah (2013b), translingual practice is applied as an umbrella term to capture the professional's different ways of engagement in meaning-making processes at work, simultaneously moving between languages, ways of speaking, semiotic resources and modalities of communication, mediating between ideologies, and constructing his/her communicative repertoire and professional identities.The translingual practice perspective treats language as a dynamic process rather than a discrete entity, separate from other languages, and as something that we do rather than as something we have.It relates to acts of languaging,1 namely, to language users' deployment of all the available language resources at their disposal (Jørgensen, 2008, p. 169).In translingual practice, individuals as social agents bring their repertoires, understandings and earlier experiences to situated interactions, and give meaning to them.Translingual practices gain meaning and uptake in relation to the objectives, participants, settings and interests concerned in the particular context (Canagarajah, 2013c;Kimura & Canagarajah, 2018).In this approach, identities, communities and cultures are seen as talked into being as well as mediating individual instances of language use: there is a reciprocal relationship.Although norms of interaction set constraints for repertoire use and translingual practices, individuals may simultaneously have the power to resist, (re)produce and transform those norms, and the wider sociocultural and ideological models connected to registers, languages, styles or codes (Jaspers & Madsen, 2016, pp. 239-240; see also Canagarajah, 2013b, pp. 29-30;Heller, 2001Heller, , 2010)).
Translanguaging relates closely to the notion of translingual practice.While here translingual practice is viewed as focusing on social practices (Canagarajah, 2014, p. 79), translanguaging adds a necessary dimension for understanding the individual's processes when using mobile repertoires, as discussed further below.

Translanguaging
Translanguaging refers to a process of making meaning and producing knowledge in which speakers move not only between languages but also beyond them, and beyond the boundaries between languages as culturally and politically defined and labelled (Wei, 2016, pp. 3-4; see also Otheguy, García, & Reid, 2015, p. 281).Translanguaging includes codeswitching (García, 2009), that is, the practice of using two or more languages, or 'codes', in one communicative situation (Gumperz, 1982;Heller, 1988;Auer, 1999;Higgins, 2007) which has also been observed in business contexts (e.g.Virkkula-Räisänen, 2010;Cogo, 2012).As regards the use of BELF, it is part of translingual practices, where all the languages of each co-participant are always present in the interaction (Jenkins, 2015).In ELF situations, codeswitching, which can involve single words, phrases or whole sentences (Grosjean, 2008, p. 160), has been seen to serve various significant discourse and communicative functions: an accommodation strategy (Cogo, 2009), or a way to specify the addressee, introduce a new idea, or appeal for assistance (Klimpfinger, 2009).While the codeswitching perspective focuses on languages, or 'codes', and presupposes that they are distinct, translanguaging moves beyond the notion of shifting between two (or more) languages.It considers a speaker's complete communicative repertoire, in which the speaker's construction and use of discursive practices cannot be easily assigned to one or another traditionally defined language (see García, 2009;García & Wei, 2014).Cogo's (2016) study is the first to apply the concept of translanguaging in analyzing ELF interactions.Cogo distinguished translanguaging to include overt and covert resources that could be traced to distinct languages (English, German, Spanish) as part of a speaker's repertoire.This marks the traditional way of utilizing translanguaging in applied linguistics which, as Kusters, Spotti, Swanwick, & Tapio, (2017, p. 10) argue, has "attended to multilingual communication without really paying attention to multimodality and simultaneity, and to hierarchies within the simultaneous combination of resources." Recently, shifting between and beyond semiotic modes and modalities has been more widely included in the translanguaging perspective (Baynham, Bradley, Callaghan, Hanusova, & Simpson, 2015;Blackledge & Creese, 2017), that is, focusing on a person's use of his/her full communicative repertoire (see Wei, 2016Wei, , p. 3, 2017)).Translanguaging has also started to gain attention not only in speaking and face-to-face interactions but also in writing (Canagarajah, 2011).Language is thus seen as part of a complex multisensory and multimodal semiotic system (Wei, 2017).Translanguaging is concerned with not only languages but also the whole semiotic and multimodal resources that language users deploy, hence the interconnectedness between languages and other human communication systems.Language users, also in business, should be seen as communicators who have agency to draw on all available resources critically and creatively, either by following or breaking rules and norms and inventing new ones (see García, 2009;Wei, 2011Wei, , p. 1224;;García & Wei, 2014, p. 9;García & Kano, 2014, pp. 260-261).Translanguaging helps us understand the individual professional's communicative experience and his/her simultaneous deployment of resources in making meaning and producing knowledge in professional settings (see García & Wei, 2014;Wei, 2016, pp. 4-5).Difference (linguistic, semiotic, and otherwise) becomes a resource by means of translanguaging, which involves aspects of multilingual, multisemiotic and multimodal practices that bring together the structural, cognitive and cultural complexities into a coordinated whole (see Wei, 2011Wei, , 2016, pp. 4, 22, pp. 4, 22; see also Leppänen, Kytölä, Jousmäki, Peuronen, & Westinen, 2014;Leppänen, Kytölä, Westinen, & Peuronen, 2017).2This approach is important in order both to understand repertoires and the communication of professional actors operating globally, and to analyse repertoires holistically, which requires the use of various types of data and methods of analysis.

Data and Analytical Focus
This chapter focuses on Oskari, a professional in the field of technology.His L1 is Finnish.After 9 years of basic education, Oskari went to high school and studied at a university of applied sciences.As an engineering student he carried out a fourmonth internship in a factory in Germany in 2003.At school, Oskari learned two foreign languages: English for 10 years, beginning in 3rd grade, and Swedish for 5 years, from 8th grade onwards.After graduation, he has worked as a project engineer, project manager and an operations manager in middle-sized and multinational companies, and completed a Master of Business Administration (MBA) program. 3his chapter focuses on the translingual practices found in workplace data collected during ethnographic fieldwork in China in 2009 and 2016 as part of the longitudinal research project.The data include fieldnotes, pictures and audio-and video-recordings of speaking (face-to-face and computer-mediated) and writing practices (hand-written and digital).The data were roughly transcribed and analysed to identify prominent phenomena.As a result, the following shifts emerged, between (1) different specialised ways of speaking (similar to intralingual translanguaging in Baynham et al., 2015), ( 2) languages (interlingual, ibid.), (3) semiotic resources (intersemiotic), and ( 4) modalities (or intermodal to continue from Baynham et al.'s typology).For this chapter, excerpts of these types of shifts were selected to provide an overview of Oskari's repertoire and translingual practices and the changes in them in different kinds of spoken and written interactions.
The excerpts were transcribed in detail. 4The micro-level discourse analysis focuses on the resources part of Oskari's repertoire and the communicative strategies and contextualization cues (Gumperz, 1996) used to negotiate meaning, achieve mutual understanding and communicate goals.Interactional sociolinguistics (IS) is useful to show the mobilization of and shifts between the various resources that translanguagers engage in.IS provides tools to understand how the professional's meaning-making practices index his history, the context and business goals.The use of the repertoire points to the wider context, constituting and creating the social reality (e.g.Gumperz, 1999).The analysis attends to trajectories of talk and text as well as procedures and processes, to see how meaning is shaped (cf.Canagarajah, 2013aCanagarajah, , 2013b, pp. 14, 78-79), pp. 14, 78-79).

Findings
This section highlights the professional's typical translingual practices first as a project manager and then as an operations manager, and shows how his repertoire changes from an orientation to technical matters to an orientation to business matters and customer relations.

Project Manager's Translingual Practices
This section discusses Oskari's translingual practices as a project manager in China in 2009.It begins with the first work-related discussion he had during one of his trips.Oskari is standing in the airport arrivals hall, looking for the driver who will take us to the company.Since the driver is not there, Oskari calls Sheila (L1 Chinese), an administrative person at the Chinese subsidiary who handles practical matters such as personnel transportation, because visiting workers like Oskari did not then drive themselves.The following is from my fieldnotes (translated from Finnish into English) (Excerpt 9.1): Excerpt 9.1: Phone talk "Oskari made a phone call: "Hello Sheila, where is our kuski?"smiling, and then he continued in English.Then it was probably Sheila who called back [−--] to say that it would take about 10 min.The driver had gotten stuck in traffic.By the way, Oskari greeted the caller by saying Ni hao".Excerpt 9.1 shows how China as a work space affords particular types of translingual practices.First, Oskari addresses Sheila using her first, English name and asks for the driver using the Finnish word "kuski" instead of using the most likely option, English.Judging from Oskari's follow-up, which does not include any explanation or elaboration of the word choice ("kuski"), Sheila shares this linguistic resource and knows the referent.I noticed later that Oskari used "kuski" on other similar occasions at work, too.Starting their second exchange, Oskari uses the Chinese "Ni hao" (hello).Overall, his word choices originate in three languages that are part of his repertoire, albeit to a different degree.However, Oskari does not explicitly distinguish between them but rather demonstrates that this is his normal way of speaking with colleagues in China.
At the company, Oskari did not have an office of his own but he worked in a negotiation room with a large table, chairs, whiteboard, book shelves, projector and screen (see Fig. 9.1).
Oskari usually had the computer on.Other workers (engineering and administrative personnel) often came in to ask questions and discuss customer projects.Oskari also received frequent phone and Skype calls from colleagues in China and Finland.Excerpt 9.2a illustrates the use of and shifting between different languages and modalities and the prominence of a technical way of speaking, which is characterised by the use of technical vocabulary and drawings.The excerpt comes from a face-toface and Skype discussion with a Finnish engineer, Tuomo (=U), and the Chinese subsidiary manager, Sam (=S), who shares the office with Oskari.On the phone, Oskari and Tuomo, speaking Finnish, try to find out whether a customer has been asked to approve a specific part of some work.Oskari says in Finnish that he must find a memo with the latest information, and searches through files on his computer.Then the following occurs (Excerpt 9.2a):

Excerpt 9.2a Skype and face-to-face talk
[139] O: >no emmä nyt tiiä< tässä on highest pointit (1.5) linear sectionit on laitettu ja (2.0) ((>well I don't know< here are highest points (1.5) linear sections added and)) [140] <meijä layoutit on hyväksytetty ja> (5.0) ((<our layouts have been approved and>)) [141] ((>grain support (beam) pipe is constant through the machine hall((> (8.0) [142] U: kumpaa se on onkse toi se on toi (.) tammikuu ((which one is it is it the (.) January)) [143] O: tää on tammikuu joo (.)°sitä kans mitä katotaan tässä° (2.0) ((this is January yeah (.) °that too we're just looking at here°)) [144] Sam have you discussed with: Mr. Zhang about this (1.0)mm: layout (1.0) [145] and this ducting problem Excerpt 9.2a shows Oskari switching between reading the minutes of a meeting (in English) on his computer screen and mediating its information in speech to the co-participants, Tuomo in Finnish and Sam in English.His language choice thus depends on his interlocutor.Oskari's speech contains specialised, technical vocabulary, much of which sounds Finnish but is grammatically modified from English: "memoa "(memo, which actually refers to the minutes of the meeting, see line 152), "highest pointit" (points), "linear sectionit" (sections), "layoutit" (layouts).Such technical vocabulary is interesting in terms of normativity and translanguaging: the professionals are not separating distinct languages nor orienting to understanding problems but rather they are demonstrating the existence of a normal, shared way of speaking.
Oskari keeps the sentence from the minutes in the English original (line 141).Such choice reflects the task at hand: Oskari mediating the main points of the memo, written in English, to Tuomo.Oskari switches to English to ask Sam whether he has discussed the ducting problem with another engineer (line 144).After some discussion with Sam, Oskari switches back to Finnish to ask Tuomo about the contents of their pictures (line 160).Here, address terms are interesting: Oskari addresses the co-participants informally (first names) but an absent engineer formally (Mister and surname).Oskari thus mediates between co-participants' repertoires, modalities, languages and norms.
After the Skype call ended, Oskari and Sam notice that something needs to be checked with Juha, another Finnish engineer working downstairs, to whom Oskari calls.Excerpt 9.2b illustrates the simultaneous use of speech, different modalities, and gestures, and particularly the technical way of speaking: Excerpt 9.2b tion to the effect that no one is answering.Oskari's metacomment (line 241) in Finnish is clearly targeted at me: he is indexing not only his own but also our shared history of living in Germany, where he would often ask for my help with German.Moreover, he follows the rules of German grammar and by implication orients to a learner identity.Interestingly, Oskari does not orient to Sam about Juha not answering, but he goes on with the original topic of project properties.There is evident shifting between semiotic resources here: the screen, to which both participants orient, provides essential information for the meeting, and Oskari uses a deictic expression "this" (lines 247-250) and points towards the screen.Semiotic resources are thus necessary here in order to achieve business goals.Next, he uses speech and gesture to explain what kind of piping he means (line 252).The explanation seems to be successful, judging by Sam's positive response and display of knowledge (lines 253 and 255).
In the excerpt where Oskari shifts between modalities (speaking face-to-face and via Skype), the clear separation between distinct languages (English, Finnish) functions as a resource for social inclusion.For example, shifting from English to Finnish functions as a strategy to address a Finnish-speaking colleague in Finland.As a codeswitch, it relates to a change in the participation framework (Goffman, 1981) and to the presence of parallel conversations, one in English and the other in Finnish.In meetings where English is the shared language such codeswitching may be part of a side sequence and a participant's deliberate disengagement from the main conversation (see Franceschi, 2017, pp. 68-69).Here, however, the meeting itself is also mobile and flexible, and it is not a question of having English as the principal language but rather of doing one's job with multiple simultaneous and cooccurring tasks using whatever resources are needed (for similar results, see Ehrenreich, 2009, p. 138).The presence of other languages besides English here is due to social relations and a shared first language between the participants (Oskari and Tuomo having Finnish as L1) and Tuomo's only slight knowledge of English.Hence, despite the presence of speakers with different L1 s, not all of the participants need English because of language mediators like Oskari (see also Virkkula-Räisänen, 2010;Lønsmann, 2014).Codeswitching is thus a significant resource in Oskari's professional communicative repertoire.

The Operations Manager's Translingual Practices
This section discusses Oskari's translingual practices as an operations manager in China after major changes have occurred: he has completed an MBA program and moved to a managerial position with over 100 subordinates and responsibility for making a profit.His way of speaking has changed from a technical to a business way of speaking, to deal with business operations and customer relations, as I will now illustrate.
Excerpt 9.3 reveals shifting between languages, semiotic resources and modalities in order to carry out co-occurring, but not necessarily directly related, tasks.This shifting occurs when the participants are about to orient to the main goal of a Skype meeting, namely, talking about a customer project with participants present both physically (J = John, a team leader with L1 Chinese, and K=Kalle, Oskari's boss with L1 Finnish) and remotely (A = Adam, a departmental manager with L1 Chinese).The meeting5 is held at Oskari's office (see Fig. 9.2).
Oskari and Adam had agreed earlier that Adam would call Oskari.While waiting for the call, Kalle starts discussing financial issues related to another customer project with Oskari, in Finnish.At the end of Oskari and Kalle's discussion, the following occurs (Excerpt 9. (2.0) ((O clicking the mouse)) [10] okei aa: I will call Adam [11] but here also Kalle for your information is the (1.0) [12] the email from the customer the BOM [13] so this was (4.0) [14] this was now sent after we finalised the NDA? (4.0) [58] is that okay [59] A: yeah sure Because a problem has arisen, the conversation between Oskari and Kalle is confidential and not meant for the present participant, John.Before the shift to the main meeting occurs, Kalle makes a final comment on the incident in Finnish (line 7) and Oskari evaluates the matter with a stressed "huhhu", thus displaying his astonishment and critical stance.Codeswitching here marginalises and excludes John from the conversation for business reasons: the choice of Finnish over English affects participation (see also Virkkula-Räisänen, 2010;Mondada, 2012).Cogo (2012) has also identified similar inclusion and exclusion strategies as part of the management of lingua franca conversations in business settings.
When the situation changes from a private conversation to a joint Skype meeting, Oskari switches into English ("okei I will call Adam", line 10).This marks the codeswitch as an inclusion strategy.While encountering some technical hitches, Oskari talks to himself in Finnish, which signals that his talk is not meant for everyone.After this, Oskari ensures everyone's access to the same information by projecting the customer's email onto the screen and sharing it digitally with Adam (line 17).The customer's email is an important semiotic resource, functioning as a "discussion participant" by providing essential information about the customer's business needs.After reading the email, Kalle's comment on the component prices in Finnish includes Oskari but excludes John again (line 19).Next, Adam's answering the phone (line 27) signals a shift in modality and the participation framework as the participants include him in the discussion with their greetings (lines 28, 29, 33).Before moving on to the actual job talk, some negotiation work is carried out that seem necessary for remote communication: Oskari introduces the meeting participants to Adam, who cannot see them because he has only a voice connection, and explains screen-sharing, checking whether it is visible to Adam.Also, John makes an announcement about another meeting, which sets time constraints on the present one.After this, Oskari switches to meeting talk with so (line 55), as is very typical of him, and specifies the purpose of the meeting (information transfer, line 56).His turn thus properly opens the Skype meeting, which is thereafter mostly carried on in English.
Excerpt 9.4 is an illustration of shifting between ways of speaking.Oskari meets John and Mike (=M, a department manager, L1 Chinese) to discuss a quotation and pricing of a customer project.The customer has queried the high price with John.The following instance occurs about 24 min into the meeting.John (line 130) explicitly asks Oskari how to justify the price to the customer.John's initiative triggers instructions from Oskari both on how to explain the price and on how to speak to the customer.

Excerpt 9.4 Face-to-face meeting
[131] O: you explain that we have given extremely low price to to start start and expand the the the O: it's a special price (.) for them to make these things a-go forward The Excerpt (9.4) illustrates five different ways in which Oskari instructs John how to explain the price to the customer.The first occurs in lines 131-133, where John also participates by offering a candidate term, "concept", which Oskari does not seem to accept, using instead the term cooperation (line 133).The second occurs in line 136, where Oskari is about to give further instructions but then self-repairs and asks John "if you have not already explained that this is not", overlapping with John's response "no".During a silence, Oskari's embodiment and particularly gaze shift signal discontent with John's answer (line 139).Then, Oskari's turn "you have not (just) explained our price?"uttered with smiling voice and a slight laughter can be seen as a complaint about John's failure to explain the price.While a smiling voice can function to mitigate power and signal a less critical stance (see Holt, 2012), laughter can represent dissent and power relations (Canagarajah, 2013b, p. 102).Here, both functions are justified.The complaint marks a shift in talk.The third way that Oskari uses (lines 143-145) involves resources to emphasise the message, including stress and slower speech."Crying blood" here means doing everything one can, and more, to achieve one's goals; it is possibly a translation from the Finnish expression "itkeä verta" and thus marks lingua franca characteristics of this talk (Pitzl, 2009).Another way occurs in line 179.Each of these explanations accompanies metatalk that displays Oskari's attitude.Oskari is clearly speaking as a leader and an instructor of how to 'do customer talk', using several communicative strategies: repetition, reformulation, metatalk, stress, slower pace and gestures.Repetition is a device to ensure understanding and a pre-emptive strategy to prevent non-understanding (see also Mauranen, 2006).Moreover, Oskari shifts between a leadership way of speaking and customer talk; for example, he animates customer talk as a tool in the instruction.Such translanguaging reflects both the goals of the business and the leader's task of ensuring that these goals are met.In an interview, Oskari associates a direct speaking style, also visible here, with a Finnish way of speaking English at work (Räisänen, 2016).
The last three excerpts illustrate translingual practices in writing.As background information for Excerpt 9.5 (a picture of Oskari's note book, Fig. 9.3), in a meeting with a customer Oskari presented the company and there was a discussion about the customer's business goals and future collaboration.During the meeting, Oskari took the following notes: Excerpt 9.5 Notes These notes are a product of Oskari's engagement in multiactivities (Haddington, Keisanen, Mondada, & Nevile, 2014), where talking and writing occur simultane- ously, the writing related to and dependent on the talking (Mondada & Svinhufvud, 2016, p. 25).The notes are written in the form of bullet points and include English, Finnish and Chinese features.The date is written in the year-month-day format, a national standard used in China that Oskari seems to have adopted.Table 9.1 below illustrates the languages of the notes and translations of the features that are in Finnish.
In the notes, the most prominent information is written first in the language and way of speaking of the meeting, including business-specific terminology such as category management, 3D simulations, and KPI's.The following are in Finnish: "has been for a couple of years, important, no workers can come…", and "model possible".Interestingly, Finnish items evaluate, provide further information and signal Oskari's attitude.For example, "Tärkeä!" points toward cognitive processes behind the activity of note-taking: Oskari seems to be thinking and evaluating in his L1.This example indicates that English and Finnish have different functions in Oskari's repertoire and in cognition.More evidence, however, is naturally needed to further support this claim.
While Excerpt 9.5 oriented to the written product, as most research on translanguaging in writing has tended to do (Canagarajah, 2011; see also Smith, Pacheco, & de Almeida, 2017 on digital writing), Excerpt 9.6a deals with the process of producing writing.The excerpt is a transcription6 of Oskari's actions during the writing of an email to a customer.Here the focus is on the consecutive steps that Oskari takes in using multiple semiotic resources in action (cf. Kusters et al., 2017, p. 8) [35] ((opens customer NDA)) reading [36] ((writes after '9.Remedies')) writing email Although NDA is mutual, [37] ((opens customer NDA)) reading [38] to modify that clause to state that actual damages deleting [39] to be removed, or modified?We are of course willing to compensate actual damages, but writing [40] but deleting The email writing process interestingly captures the 'going-between-andbeyond-semiotic-resources-and-modalities' and shows the reasons behind such translanguaging in business.In writing the email, Oskari engages in various micropractices (Mondada & Svinhufvud, 2016, p. 37) and utilises several affordances: in line 10 he opens a document (customer's non-disclosure agreement, NDA) from his email and copy-pastes a term from it into his own message.In addition, the content of this and the company's own NDA influence the writing process.For instance, after reading the two documents for over a minute (line 21), Oskari rewrites the email, deleting and adding text.Moreover, he uses his mobile phone as an affordance by conducting a word search ("injunction") in its dictionary.In contrast to Ehrenreich's (2009, p. 141) findings, where employees would rarely consult a dictionary but would ask for a colleague's help instead, Oskari uses this resource in writing to a customer about a topic that he considers challenging (line 45 below).Furthermore, he deletes earlier writing (line 38) that indicated a request for a modification of the NDA document and instead writes "to be removed, or modified" (line 39).The rewriting shows a slightly changed approach to the topic than the deleted text.Hence, the use of an affordance is followed by actions in the writing process: either removing or modifying previous writing or writing something new.Oskari continues (Excerpt 9.6b): Example 9.6b LINES OMITTED [43] O: joo (xxx) speaking [44] ((opens customer NDA at '9. Remedies')) reading [45] nää on tosi aikaavieviä ja kimurantteja nää tota (.) speaking ((these are really time-consuming and tricky these I mean)) [46] T: mm [47] O: nää tota sopim-ja varsinki nää NDAt speaking ((these contrac-and especially these NDAs)) [48] tietysti jokainen tekee sen silleen et se on niinku (.) seiftattu speaking ((of course everyone makes it so that it is like (.) secured)) ((opens company's own NDA)) reading [56] ?We are of course willing to compensate actual damages.
deleting [57] for example so that actual damages are compensated? writing [58] (20.0) [59] ((presses send)) computer [60] no mennään tolla speaking ((ok let's go with that)) After Oskari has opened the customer NDA for the sixth time (line 44), he provides a metalinguistic commentary about NDAs as "really time-consuming and tricky" (line 45, targeted to the researcher), which points to the difficulty of reaching an agreement with the customer, the writing process and his earlier actions on the task.In his commentary, he also uses the word "seiftattu", which is a transformation from the English "secured".Smith et al. (2017) describe a process of meshing multiple languages and modalities as multimodal codemeshing to show "how individuals move across modalities and languages to begin meaning negotiation with a real or imagined reader" (p.8).For Oskari, such codemeshing is necessary to meet business goals and ensure that the correct information is transmitted.The writing process takes altogether around 12 min and concludes with the final product (Excerpt 9.7).

Excerpt 9.7 Email
"Dear Mr. (Surname), Thank you for the discussions on Friday.I went through your NDA, and have one change request, hopefully it is doable.The clause in question is 9. Remedies.Although NDA is mutual, (our company) can't accept automatic sanctions or penalties in the breach of contract.Is it possible to be removed or modified for example so that actual damages are compensated?" These two excerpts complement each other in revealing how professional repertoires are used in writing practices at work.The process approach (Excerpt 9.6) enables to capture the multiple actions and activities that occur in the composition of the final product (Excerpt 9.7), which is usually the focus of analysis of business emails (e.g.Jensen, 2009;Millot, 2017).Importantly, these excerpts illustrate that a repertoire is the result of translingual practices (Canagarajah, 2013b, p. 31).Had only the final product been analysed, the individual experiences, and actions involved in the actual activity would have remained invisible.As also noted by Kimura and Canagarajah (2018, p. 303), translanguaging should be further explored in writing, which Mondada and Svinhufvud (2016) define as a social activity, a practice and a cognitive process.Furthermore, as the metacommentary reveals, engaging in the research process may help individuals to become more aware of the challenges they face.

Discussion
This chapter has shown that translingual practices and translanguaging are important theoretical notions that are fruitful in the conceptualisation of the versatile repertoire needed and used in global working life.Methodologically, the chapter has demonstrated how interactional and multimodal analyses, and process and product approaches, can shed light on translanguaging as done in actual spoken and written interactions and activities in global working life.The chapter has also illustrated how different semiotic resources are mobilised in workplace communication.
In particular, this chapter has discussed the translingual practices of a professional first as a project manager and then as an operations manager in the field of technology and global business.It has given an overview of typical workplace practices and shown major changes in his repertoire over time.The detailed analyses have demonstrated that the professional shifts between languages, ways of speaking, semiotic resources and modalities in different activities, job positions and over time.The findings show that languages remained in the repertoire but ways of speaking changed from technically oriented to business oriented.
English as a business lingua franca was not the only resource needed.Translanguaging emerged with the potential to overcome miscommunication (see Blackledge & Creese, 2017, p. 16) and as socially and rhetorically significant, shown for example in the deployment of bits of Chinese and in the shifting between ways of speaking.Communicative competence manifested itself not as perfect mastery of distinct languages but as an ability to unite resources into a coherent whole in situated interactions (Canagarajah, 2013b, pp. 1-2, 6;Kimura & Canagarajah, 2018, pp. 296-298).Such competence points towards successful socialization into work practices.
Attention to the communicative repertoire and translanguaging gave access to "human sociality, human cognition, social relations, and social structures" (Wei & Hua, 2013, p. 520).It also made it possible to understand how the participant deployed resources strategically and creatively for effective communication and mediated complex social and cognitive activities in order to act, know and be (Wei, 2016, p. 21; see also García, 2009).These findings revealed not only individuals' actions at work, but also some of the cognitive processes behind the actions.For instance, email writing exemplified translanguaging as legitimate and helpful in the writing process; using what one knows to solve what one does not know (Velasco & García, 2014. p. 10).Technological modalities and digital artefacts play an important role in the cognitive processes of translanguaging.Thus the emergence and development of a repertoire could be approached from the point of view of the distributed cognitive process (Hutchins, 2014, p. 37, italics added) that derives from the interactions between people, artefacts and space (Pennycook, 2017, p. 9).
Although physically residing in one place, the professional's studied activities and interactions occurred in a transnational space, in a nexus of activities, practices, processes and global flows.It could be seen as a translanguaging space (Wei, 2011(Wei, , 2017)), where identities are (re)constructed, power, social and interpersonal relations enacted, and values generated.These spaces enable individuals to reshape and reconstruct work practices, making translanguaging acceptable, legitimate, necessary and useful.Translanguaging thus shapes both individual and spatial repertoires (Mazak, 2017, p. 5).
Diachronic studies of mobile professional repertoires like the one presented in this chapter are able to offer insights into globalisation processes in the contact zones of business.This study deepens our understanding of the complexity of work that requires individuals to transcend different boundaries and find ways of combining multiple meaning-making resources in order to achieve their ever more complex and demanding goals.Moreover, it also calls for further studies on the ideological, economic and political aspects of such practices.Translations from Finnish to English

Table 9 .1
Languages in the notes .