Languages constitute the vehicle of information, notably of scientific information. The creating of a single European market requires that all partners joining in economic activities are able to have access to the information sent for their use in languages other than their own and that inversely they are able to communicate the information which they send to people who do not speak their language. This is the problem of transfer of information between languages, otherwise known as translation.

More precisely, the negative economic impact of multilinguation is doubled for the European economic agencies.

Insofar as producers of goods and services are concerned they come up against additional obstacles when they wish to export, which translates into losses of time and money and by way of consequence, into reduced competitiveness.

As far as consumers of goods and services are concerned they encounter added difficulties in keeping themselves informed about the most recent technical developments and in obtaining for themselves the most modern equipment, which has a as a consequence a technological delay and therefore in this instance again a loss of competitiveness.

By way of contrast, the fact of being the only important economic and industrial block having to find a solution to such problems could give a considerable economic advantage to Europe: it has here a unique opportunity to acquire valuable know-how in the realm of the treatment of languages which it will be able to maximize in the economic plan (directly in selling its experience and knowledge; indirectly in surmounting more easily other language barriers with external economic partners: USSR, China, the Arab World, Latin America etc.) and in the social plan (in applying its learning to the integration of handicapped etc.) in the collection of activities such as single and multilingual.

The development of healthy and profitable language skills should assure a world wide supremacy for Europe for a very long time.