Art historical research on socialist internationalisms has mainly focused on museums and exhibitions, overlooking art academies as important cultural diplomacy actors. This article examines the experiences and artworks of Vietnamese students at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (AVU) during Czechoslovakia’s normalization (1969–1989) and connects them to global art history and “mobility turn” debates. Despite growing interest in socialist internationalisms, the micro-social and aesthetic translation processes within education institutions have received little attention. This study analyzes how the largest group of foreign students at AVU, those from Vietnam, navigated differing socialist art conceptions and why Prague’s models were difficult to translate to Vietnam. Drawing on previously unpublished archival sources and four oral history interviews, my study applies Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s considerations on translation to the visual realm and extends them to AVU as hierarchical “contact zone.” I demonstrate how the academy’s hierarchies led to the disregard of the students’ countries of origin’s artistic realities and further argue that their training rendered them aesthetically incompatible with Vietnamese artistic expression, thus limiting their career opportunities. Ultimately, this study establishes translatability as a productive analytical tool for understanding socialist mobility systems.