This essay shows how one professor teaching "Introduction to Buddhism" sought to counteract his students' view that Chinese and Tibetan forms of Buddhism represented a deviation from a "pure" Indian Buddhism rather than worthwhile forms of creativity and religiosity in themselves. A simple comparative assignment that asked a group of primarily monolingual students from Minnesota to translate a 500-year-old French ditty into English helped illustrate the inextricability of form and content, that all translation is interpretation, that translations target specific audiences, and that religious systems that might be intuitively conceptualized as perversions of a pure original can be more charitably understood as valuable systems of thought and practice in their own right. The assignment shows that linguistic translation can be a valuable form of comparative pedagogy in the undergraduate classroom beyond language classes, especially as a proxy for simulating the challenges and possibilities of intercultural translation.