The view of sign languages as bounded systems is oft important for deaf community empowerment and for pedagogical practice in terms of supporting deaf children’s language acquisition and second language learners’ communicative competence. Vice versa, the notion of translanguaging in the American Sign Language (ASL) community points out a number of recurring tensions linked to standard language ideology and English-based sign systems in deaf education; these tensions can act to obscure the polyglot nature of ASL itself. This article reports how translingual practices were embedded in an ethnographic action research study of developing and field-testing an ASL curriculum for parents of young deaf children that is aligned with the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR). In this inquiry of teaching parents classical ASL varieties, translingual practices were pointed out where ASL and the visual code of English are regularly in contact with and influence each other in signers’ multimodal repertoires. This data elucidate the history of translanguaging in ASL communities and indicates the importance of preserving historic deaf community language practices.