Langues form the vehicle for information, notably economic information. The creation of a single European market requires that all the partners participating in economic activity should be able to have access to information put at their disposal in languages other than their own, and that conversely they should be able to communicate information intended for people who do not speak their language. The problem is that of transferring information between languages, otherwise known as translation.

More precisely, the negative economic impact of multilingualism is double for European economic agents:

As producers of goods and services, they encounter extra obstacles when they wish to export, which translates into loss of time and money, and as a result, a loss in competitiveness.

As consumers of goods and services, they experience increased difficulties in keeping informed of the most recent technical developments and obtaining the most modern equipment, which results in a technological slowdown, and so again a loss in competitiveness.

On the other hand, the fact of being the only important economic and industrial block in the world which has to solve such problems can also give Europeans a considerable economic advantage: it gives us the opportunity to acquire valuable know-how in the area of language manipulation which we should be able to capitalize on economically (directly, by selling our experience and its applications; indirectly, by making it easier to overcome other linguistic barriers to relations with external economic partners: USSR, China, the Arab world, Latin America, etc.), and socially (by applying its results to the integration of handicapped people, etc.), in a range of activities that could be as much monolingual as multilingual.

The development of healthy and profitable language industries would in the longest term ensure a world supremacy for Europe.