Translanguaging space construction in a Chinese-Russian border city: a multimodal perspective from vlogs

This study examines how translanguaging practices in Heihe, a Chinese-Russian border city, construct borderland cultural identities through the mobilisation of multimodal resources. Grounded in García and Li Wei’s translanguaging framework and employing multimodal discourse analysis, it analyses vlogs from the Bilibili platform to explore how vendors, customers, and vloggers activate their full semiotic repertoires in cross-cultural interactions within a border translanguaging space. The findings reveal that translanguaging in Heihe facilitates identity construction along three interrelated dimensions. At the identity level, participants transform translanguaging competence into symbolic capital by innovating with mixed Chinese-Russian codes, thereby generating hybrid identities beyond monolingual affiliations. At the spatial level, everyday discourse reconfigures the border from a geopolitical divide into a cultural conduit. At the emotional level, shared rituals and reciprocal gestures forge affective bonds that transcend linguistic comprehension. Overall, the study demonstrates that everyday interactions in Heihe constitute a distinctive translanguaging space where language use not only meets communicative needs but also functions as a mechanism for producing new forms of borderland cultural identity. These findings extend the spatial scope of translanguaging theory and offer fresh insights into identity construction in borderland contexts.