This essay offers a brief survey of translation practices among Vietnamese speakers and, as an example, analyzes a seventeenth-century translation of a Buddhist text from Classical Chinese into vernacular Vietnamese that survives in an eighteenth-century reprinting. Analyses of places in the text where a discernible divergence appears between the source text and the target text offer opportunities to examine choices made by the translator and to explore the cultural context that might have plausibly conditioned those choices.