With reference to Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation (1989) and four other texts I examine how translingual writers represent experiences of bringing what Hoffman calls 'terms from elsewhere' into dominant cultural dialogues. Alongside Hoffman's memoir I consider BulgarianFrench philosopher Tzvetan Todorov's "Bilinguisme, dialogisme et schizophrenie" (1985), Indianborn US writer Ginu Kamani's "Code Switching" (2000), Russian-born Australian journalist Irene Ulman's "Playgrounds and Battlegrounds" (2007) and French-Australian novelist Catherine Rey's "To Make a Prairie it Takes a Clover and One Bee" (2013). For all the diversity of translingual trajectories these 5 texts represent, there are conspicuous parallels between their accounts of speaking in a "minority voice". My focus is on experiences of involuntary dissent, a form of ambivalent group membership, which constitutes a significant and critically overlooked aspect of translingual identity.