Voice in mobile texts has got attention lately amid scholars in sociolinguistics, literacy, and rhetoric. Some sociolinguists of globalisation have claimed that uptake is molded by the norms of each literacy regime. Though texts of non-western communities will gain positive uptake in local literacy regimes according to their own norms and resources, they are regarded silenced in translocal contexts where elite norms and resources are justified. This paper assays the ways in which a Japanese student and her instructor negotiated voice in an American university-level writing course. The case study, resulting from teacher research, displays how both the instructor and the student parleyed uptake for a voice that merged the resources from the student’s own cultural background and the dominant conventions of academic literacies. What made this translingual textual realisation possible was the design of the classroom as a contact zone, along the definition of Mary Louise Pratt. Such a pedagogy offers ecological affordances for the negotiation of rivalling norms and the apparition of novel genres.