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Translanguaging studies have paid much attention to meaning-making processes, exploring multilingual speakers’ strategic selection of linguistic features from a holistic linguistic repertoire to convey meanings, and assuming that multilingual addressees can successfully decode the encoded meanings. Failure in the meaning-interpreting processes in relation to translanguaging contexts is largely ignored. To bridge the gap, this study explores Chinese multilingual/bilingual addressees’ misinterpretations in translanguaging contexts, by probing into the mechanisms of misinterpretation. Misinterpretations are found to occur as a consequence of gaps between the addresser and the addressee in the cognitive, social-historical, and cultural dimensions of a Translanguaging Space, and failure of the Translanguaging Instinct resulting from various causes, such as confusion of and preferences for different linguistic codes. Furthermore, Chinese addressees’ misinterpretations are also related to addressers’ creativity or novel expressions and the spreading use of pinyin/English abbreviations in online communication. With this study, it is argued that translanguaging as a theory of practice should look into how the meaning of a new word, phrase, or abbreviation becomes conventionalised and how newcomers of a community are socialised into the shared practice of translanguaging.
