This study explores a language learner's screen while interacting from a desktop videoconferencing device as part of an intercultural telecollaboration exchange that connected teacher-trainees and French learners. Communicative tasks involving opinion exchanges require from language learners simultaneous speaking and listening comprehension skills, which may prompt linguistic difficulties. To compensate for their weaknesses, learners had access to online resources exposing them to various and complex language use. Based on Jonassen's (1992) work on 'cognitive tools' as intelligent resources that contribute to knowledge construction, the author draws on multimodal interaction analysis to question the uses of an automatic online translator in the context of Synchronous Computer Mediated Communication (SCMC). This study illustrates a learner's technical autonomy using Google Translate (GT) to search for vocabulary while interacting with his interlocutors. It reports the learner's emergence of a linguistic need which is followed by a search for vocabulary leading in some cases to the searched translation's integration within the pedagogical interaction. This study raises cognitive challenges that such a practice presents for language learning. [For the complete proceedings, see ED600837.]