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This study examines how the linguistic landscape of a university in the midwestern United States has changed since the COVID-19 pandemic, and how that change has discursively constructed the identities of the university and its community. The focus lies in the newly displayed semiotics that provides information about preventing the virus from spreading. By analysing public signs such as flyers, posters, and banners whose contents have to do with COVID-19, this study found the following five ways in which the institution and community express their identities and voices. The university’s identity has shifted to that of an agent that acts to encourage a united effort to protect itself and its community; a caring entity that cares about community members; a site for community members’ voice expression; a space creator to expand interaction from physical to online discourses; and an information deliverer for international members of the community. This study calls for research that investigates the global pandemic’s influence on the linguistic landscape.

This study explores how interlocutors from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds employ the five translingual negotiation strategies of envoicing, recontextualization, interactional activity, entextualization and transmodality to communicate in online marketplaces. Informed by conversation analysis and translingualism, three computer-mediated communication (CMC) data sets were analyzed. Findings are as follows: 1) Korean speaker’s envoicing strategy was used to reveal his non-native English speaker status, which softened the impression of discourtesy. It set the co-constructed conversation stage where English speaking counterparts would be implicitly requested to speak more intelligibly; 2) recontextualization strategy was presented through emojis, emoticons, transliteration and translation to turn a business transaction into a friendly conversation between translingual speakers from different cultures where non-verbal cues of hospitality can be delivered in written forms in online one-on-one chats; 3) interactional strategy was observed when speakers did not share a culturally-bounded speech act of “conversation closers.” Misalignment was partially solved by mutual efforts to close their online conversation; 4) entextualization strategy was shown from Korean speakers’ asynchronous communication to confer on appropriate English expression by seeking help from other online community members; and, 5) transmodal strategy refers to the practice of shuttling among different on/offline modes and platforms to encode and decode languages, emotions, and cultural perspectives by depending on a wide range of resources and multiple strategies to accomplish meaningful interaction in online marketplaces. This study shows the translingual characteristics of English-medium online communication, suggesting an extended model of translingual meaning negotiation strategies in CMC contexts.

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