Abstract Unseen words, also called out-of-vocabulary words (OOVs), are difficult for machine translation. In neural machine translation, byte-pair encoding can be used to represent OOVs, but they are still often incorrectly translated. We improve the translation of OOVs in NMT using easy-to-obtain monolingual data. We look for OOVs in the text to be translated and translate them using simple-to-construct bilingual word embeddings (BWEs). In our MT experiments we take the 5 best candidates, which is motivated by intrinsic mining experiments. Using all five of the proposed target language words as queries we mine target-language sentences. We then back-translate, forcing the back-translation of each of the five proposed target-language OOV-translation-candidates to be the original source-language OOV. We show that by using this synthetic data to finetune our system the translation of OOVs can be dramatically improved. In our experiments we use a system trained on Europarl and mine sentences containing medical terms from monolingual data.