In this article, Christine Donahue describes how her experiences as a scholar, a member of multi-country European research projects, university research laboratories, and as an invited professor in multiple institutions, have transformed her life and her approach to writing research. Donahue notes that human instinct when encountering the new, the different, the "other," seems to tend towards the "compare" instead of the "trans." That instead what is needed is a flexibility, a "trans" understanding of language, rhetoric, teaching, and learning as essential to any future imagined or have already begun, whether within the U.S. or in dialogue with other global contexts. Donahue expands on the "translingual model" where every writer, in a superdiverse world, needs to design communication and meaning-making using linguistic resources and make linguistic decisions that figure alongside the decisions the writer makes about mode or genre. In a transnational and translingual context, how writers choose to encounter international research, grounded in different histories, populations, or local contexts, is vital to how to make progress in the world.