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In this article, we report on an investigation that aimed to describe adolescent multilinguals' use of the different languages they were learning at school when performing a translation task. We wanted to find out whether written translations of a mother tongue text into the learner's different foreign languages would reflect a multilingual rather than a bilingual mode of language processing and production. We found that the extent of cross-linguistic influence was limited, and that our respondents, in most cases, managed to activate the appropriate target language only. When cross-linguistic influence occurred, it showed evidence of the activation of mainly two, and sometimes three, languages. Our findings also show that the extent of cross-linguistic influence is related to proficiency, psychotypology, the specific language combination (e.g. Dutch-French-English-German) and frequency of use, and that learners use different strategies to make up for lexical gaps in their knowledge.
