I suppose it would be sort of possible. As far as I know, the characteristic of a dish are that it's pretty hot and punchy in the center, with a big, soft feathered edge. So you would get punchy, semi-hard light, with a really gradual feather/falloff.
I would think that if you took one of those hot lights with a standard work light reflectors and used round pop up reflecting in translucent mode, you could shoot through it. The way you could experiment with how close to get the light to the shoot through surface, and get varying degrees of hot, punchy centers and feathered edges. It would be exactly like a dish of course, but I'm sure with a degree of playing around, you could get decently close to it. And at the end of the day, who cares if it looks like a beauty dish. Just use what you've got to make something that looks great. Don't worry about trying to look like something else. Good luck!