This paper addresses questions of cross-cultural communication in ways which challenge some of the typically linguistic or sociolinguistic models of addressing these issues. It discusses video workshops with Australian Vietnamese women aged 55-75 in Melbourne. The workshops were part of a larger funded project on Women and Ageing. This chapter is about the women but it is also about what it took to make the research team, including the author, capable of seeing and hearing them. The interest is in the ‘translations’ that occurred (and failed to occur) in the multilingual contexts of the workshops and in the way these cross-cultural encounters changed the researchers and indeed their research agenda. Theorizing the complexities of what this research involved requires an understanding of translation and the multimodal which does not recognize boundaries between semiotic systems. The focus is on diaspora and translation.