Translating śūnyatā into Vietnamese: why “không” keeps sliding into “nothing”

I translate philosophy into Vietnamese, and I have run into a problem that the English-language warnings about emptiness don't quite cover.

The Sino-Vietnamese word for emptiness is không (空). In the Heart Sutra, which many Vietnamese Buddhists chant, form is emptiness and emptiness is form: sắc tức thị không, không tức thị sắc. But không is also the most ordinary word for "no" or "not" in everyday Vietnamese. We say it a hundred times a day. So when people hear the sutra, many hear something like "form is no-thing", and the doctrine slides straight into nihilism through the grammar of the language.

English has the opposite problem: "empty" sounds like a container with nothing in it. The Sanskrit word always means empty of something, and what things are empty of is independent existence. Drop the "of what", and the doctrine turns into its opposite.

In our Trúc Lâm Zen tradition, founded by the emperor Trần Nhân Tông after he became a monk in the thirteenth century, teachers have always insisted on the "of what". But the everyday word keeps pulling.

I'm curious how this went in other languages. Did Chinese, Japanese, Tibetan or European translators find words that resist the slide? Or does every language eventually make emptiness sound like nothing?