This article affords insights into the interdependence between writing and critical translation to inform implementations of antiracist and translingual writing pedagogies. Promoting linguistic and social justice for multilingual writers, it presents a writing assignment design that focuses on critical translation across asymmetrical power relations between languages, texts, writers, and readers. Critical translations by an international student and a resident multilingual student receive particular attention in this article in that they strategically utilize paratexts as discursive spaces for interrogating, resisting, and reconstituting academic English writing standards and conventions. Foregrounding such paratextual interventions in critical translations as forms of translingual and anti-racist practice can bring about social justice and change in multilingual writing and its teaching.

This study accounts for the complex tensions that four FYW multilingual students from Lebanon experience as they strive to reconcile monolingual representations of language—as a fixed, internally uniform, and discrete entity—on one hand with their own commitment toward mobilizing their diverse language resources as fluid, malleable, and intermingling in their academic work. Based on an analysis of the "postmonolingual" nature of their representations of language and language relations as socially embedded and constructed, I argue that diverse, and often contradictory representations circulating in their minds have complicated, even stifled, these writers' translingual academic literacies and abilities.