This paper describes a research effort to support collaborative translation by monolingual speakers, or people that speak only the source or target language. I hypothesize that sharing knowledge across the language barrier is possible with a combination of automated (but poor quality) machine translation, language-independent communication, and existing background knowledge. I demonstrate this possibility with proof-of-concept experiments. Keywords Collaborative translation, monolingual, computer-aided translation, machine translation ACM Classification Keywords H5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.