Languages are the vehicle for the exchange of information, and in particular of economic information. As a consequence of the creation of a single European market, all participants in economic activity will need to be able to access information presented in languages other than their own, and conversely they will need to be able to communicate information to people who don't speak their language. This is the problem of transferring information between languages, in other words translation.

The issue of multilingualism has a double negative economic impact for European economic entities:

as producers of goods and services, they will face additional obstacles when exporting in the form of lost time and money, with a consequential loss of competitiveness;

as consumers of goods and services, they will have difficulty staying informed of the latest technical developments, leading to a technological lag and once again to a loss of competitiveness.

On the other hand, the fact of being the only important economic and industrial block in the world with the need to find a solution to such problems can also give Europe a considerable economic advantage: it provides a unique opportunity for it to acquire valuable expertise in the area of language processing, which it could exploit economically (directly in selling its expertise and products; indirectly in more easily surmounting other linguistic barriers in dealings with external economies: the USSR, China, the Arab World, Latin America, etc.) and socially (in applying acquired techniques for the integration of handicapped people, etc.) as much in the monolingual as in the multilingual sphere.

The development of healthy and profitable language industries should in the long term ensure worldwide supremacy for Europe.