This collaborative project explores the affordances of a translation assignment in the context of a learner-centered pedagogy that places composition students' movement among languages and cultures as both a site for inquiry and subject of analysis. The translation assignment asks students to translate scholarly articles or culture stories from their home languages into English, and then to compare their translations and reflect on these processes. In presenting a research study of students' responses to this assignment, our goal is to highlight the important moves that students make as they examine their own linguistic attributes when translating. Our goal is to analyze these student responses within a collaborative pedagogical framework that centers on students' home languages and cultures as well as on reflective practice. The curricular shift exemplified by the translation assignment reflects a purposeful placement of value on translingual competences and mirrors a national shift toward asset-based, culturally sustaining pedagogical practices.