Translanguaging in Tourism Signage

Tourism signage functions as a complex sociotechnical infrastructure shaped by translanguaging, multimodal redundancy, and digital platformization. This study employed qualitative document analysis with thematic coding to treat published scholarship as documentary data and to identify recurrent patterns in how translation and translanguaging strategies in tourism signage shape visitor experience, and how governance and platform architectures condition these effects. To construct the document dataset, PRISMA-guided identification and screening was used solely as a transparent retrieval and screening protocol, yielding a systematically selected corpus of peer reviewed studies from the last five years. The analysis identifies four dominant strategy clusters across physical and virtual signage: parallel translation, hybrid designs, transliteration, and machine translation (MT) assisted production, evaluated in relation to communicative accuracy, cultural salience, and functional reliability. Hybrid and multimodal strategies are more consistently associated with inclusivity and perceived authenticity, whereas transliteration and MT are more frequently linked to inaccuracies that reduce trust and usability. Reported outcomes including comprehension, wayfinding, satisfaction, and behavioral intent improve when multilingual mediation is contextually appropriate but deteriorate when errors persist. Governance emerges as a key moderator for multilingual provision and crisis readiness, although systematic evaluation of crisis-oriented signage remains limited. Digital platforms extend access and interactivity while also reproducing algorithmic asymmetries in linguistic visibility.