Translanguaging, visibility, and translingual (dis)investment in English-Dominant higher education

English-dominant universities are structured by monolingual ideologies that obscure how multilingual students actually learn, participate, and sustain academic work. This qualitative study examines how Chinese international students mobilize translanguaging to sustain participation, access disciplinary knowledge, and position themselves across academic and everyday domains, while institutional norms shape their investments in and disinvestments from visible multilingual practice. Drawing on eight months of longitudinal data, including screen-recorded composing sessions, interviews, analytic fieldnotes, and digital multimodal artifacts, the study shows that translanguaging functions as a central medium through which learners made sense of academic tasks and carried them forward. At the same time, English-dominant norms did not eliminate multilingual resources, but unevenly constrained their public visibility and legitimacy, often pushing them into backstage, privatized, or selectively managed forms. The findings contribute to translanguaging and investment scholarship by showing that multilingual learners’ participation was sustained not through English alone, but through semiotic labor that remained indispensable to academic work while often being only partially recognized within institutional regimes of legitimacy.