Within the translingual analytical framework, scholars have frequently come to focus on the ‘how’ behind linguistic mixture in literary texts. While the field has expanded to include Eastern European writers like Katja Petrowskaja and more unique examples like Yoko Tawada, there remains a void in the scholarship when it comes to Iberian and Latin American writers living and working in Germany. This dissertation seeks to fill this gap through an application of translingual analytical paradigms to three Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking writers: José F. A. Oliver (born in Hausach to Spanish Gastarbeiter parents in 1961), Bettina Isabel Rocha (born in 1970 to a German mother and Spanish father) and Zé do Rock (born in 1956 in Porto Alegre, home to the largest German-speaking minority in Brazil).

The dissertation centres on three key themes –– belonging, exoticisation and democratisation of language –– to explore how translingual writing strategies enable writers of mixed linguistic backgrounds to push the boundaries of linguistic borders, challenge traditional conceptions of these three themes, and, ultimately, create positive zones of cooperative contact between cultural spheres. The dissertation combines translingual analysis with an attention to intermedial features in order to explain how fluidity of both language and media allows writers to further challenge contemporary writing conventions, while aiding scholars in understanding the effects of such fluidity on both writer and reader alike. The intermedial element in particular enhances the immersive capacities of translingual writing strategies, thus increasing interactivity between text and reader and, ultimately, creating a type of literature that overcomes the limitations of written language and/or a single literary genre in representing the realities of a multicultural existence.