Languages are the vehicle of information, namely of economic information. The creation of a European single market requires that all economic partners can access information supplied in a language different from their own, and, conversely, that they can communicate their information to people speaking another language. This is the problem of transferring information, which is to say, the problem of translation.

More precisely, the negative impact of a multilingual environment has a twofold repercussion on European economic agents:

as producers of goods and services, they face extra obstacles when they wish to export; this constitutes a loss of time and money, and consequently minimizes their power of competition.

as consumers of goods and services, they increasingly find difficulties to get informed on the most recent technical developments and purchase the most modern equipment; this entails a technological delay thus, here too, a loss in competitiveness.

On the other hand, being the only industrial and economic bloc of this size in the whole world that has to find a solution to such problems, might represent a considerable advantage to Europe. This is a unique occasion for Europe to acquire a valuable know-how in language processing, both monolingual and multilingual, which can be exploited on both the economic level (directly, by selling its experience and its achievements; indirectly, by overcoming much easily other linguistic barriers in its relationships with other economic partners: the USSR, China, the Arabic-speaking world, Latin America, etc.), and on the social level (by applying these achievements to the integration of handicapped people, etc.).

The development of healthy and profitable language industries would in the long run assure a world supremacy to Europe.