<![CDATA[Sacred and philosophically dense texts create distinctive language-learning environments in which meaning is negotiated across linguistic forms, cultural histories, textual traditions, and embodied experience. Yet translanguaging research has paid comparatively limited attention to how learners negotiate interpretive authority when the object of learning is a culturally embedded philosophical text. This qualitative case-study examines multilingual meaning-making in a Bali–India learning community where Patañjali’s Yogasūtra was discussed through Sanskrit, Indonesian, Balinese, and English. The corpus comprises 21 people cosnist of 2 facilitator and 19 participants, 9 women and 10 men, and observed across 10 recorded sessions totaling 16 hours and 40 minutes, supplemented by 20 semi-structured interviews, 12 video-stimulated recall interviews, learning artifacts, and field notes. Five Critical Meaning-Making Episodes (CMEs) are presented as analytic exemplars. Across these episodes, participants mobilized translanguaging not merely to compensate for lexical gaps but to test interpretations, compare cultural frames, repair semantic approximations, and establish or contest epistemic legitimacy. The analysis proposes multilingual interpretive authority as an interactionally produced form of legitimacy through which speakers gain uptake for interpretations by coordinating linguistic, textual, experiential, and embodied resources. Gender was relevant when participants’ turns were taken up, interrupted, reformulated, or positioned as experiential rather than authoritative knowledge. Video-stimulated recall functioned as a research elicitation method rather than a learning method. The research contributes a language-education account of sacred-text learning in which translanguaging, cultural translation, and epistemic positioning are analytically connected.]]>
