Language provides a vehicle of communication, notably of business information. The establishment of a uniquely European market requires that all its members participating in economic activities have access to any information made available to them in languages other than their own and conversely that they be able to communicate information to people who do not speak their language. This is the problem of transference of information between languages, or in other words, of translation.

More precisely, the negative economic impact of having a multitude of languages is doubled for European businesses:

Producers of goods and services, for their part, suffer under the weight of additional hurdles when they want to export goods, which translates into lost time and money, and as a result, into decreased competitiveness.

Consumers of goods and services, for their part, find it increasingly difficult to keep themselves informed of the most recent technical developments and to obtain the most up-to-date equipment, resulting in technological stagnation and, in this case too, a loss of competitiveness.

On the other hand, being the world's only economic and industrial block needing to find a solution to such problems could also provide Europe a considerable economic advantage: it has a unique opportunity to gain a valuable savoir-faire in the realm of language handling, which might make it a valuable resource in economic planning (directly through the sale of its experience and successes; indirectly through overcoming linguistic barriers in its relations with external business partners--the USSR, China, the Arab world, Latin America, etc.-- more easily than others) and in social planning (applying its profits to the integration into society of the handicapped, etc.), in a variety of activities as much monolingual as multilingual.

Development of language industries which are above-board and profitable will guarantee for Europe a longer period of world supremacy.