This paper explores some very recent research, undertaken as part of a Large Australian Research Grant project entitled: ‘Stories of Ageing: A Longitudinal Study of Women's Self-Representation'. The research involved writing and video diary workshops with older women. What I want to discuss in this paper is that part of the research which involved video diary workshops, using an interpreter, with Australian Vietnamese women aged 55–70, in Fitzroy in Melbourne. None of the researchers spoke Viatnamese and the Vietnamese women (with some exceptions) spoke little English. Part of the emphasis of this paper will be on ways of translating difference, of effecting cross-cultural dialogues without a common language. In this case, the translation was through images, in the form of videos made by the women themselves in their own environments. The videos, which gave the researchers visual access to the women's lived habitus as they themselves represented it, become a complex semiotic medium for further intercultural translations. But translation is never easy. Here I will explore the complex layers of translation and dialogue, and the varieties of differently configured Vietnamese habitus, which characterised the workshop situation. The paper will also explore the other translations that occurred around and as part of this process, the way faciality, gesture, corporeality, and touch came to substitute for linguistic communication in our interactions, and above all the function of food, food-preparation and eating together, as modes of translation.