Languages are the carriers of information, notably of economic information. The creation of a single European market requires that all partners participating in economic activities should have access to information and data available to them in languages other than their own and that, conversely, they should be able to communicate information and data intended for persons who do not speak their language. This is a problem of information transfer between languages, in other words of translation.

To be precise, multilingualism has a twofold negative economic impact on Europeans engaged in economic activities:

as producers of goods and services, they come up against additional obstacles when they want to export, which are translated into lost time and money and consequently in lowered competitiveness.

as consumers of goods and services, they experience increased difficulties in finding out about the most recent technical developments and in obtaining the most modern equipment, which brings in consequence technological backwardness and thus, again, a loss of competitiveness.

On the other hand, being the only important economic and industrial bloc in the world with the obligation of finding a solution to such problems may also give Europe a considerable economic advantage. It has a unique opportunity to acquire valuable know-how in natural language processing, which it will be able to profit from in the economic sphere (directly, by selling its experience and its products; indirectly, by overcoming more easily other linguistic barriers in relations with external economic partners: USSR, China, the Arab world, Latin America, etc.) and in the social sphere (by applying its knowledge to the integration of handicapped people, etc.), within a framework of monolingual as well as multilingual activities.

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