Languages are a vehicle for information, particularly economic information. The creation of a single European market requires that all of the partners who participate in economic activities have access to information which comes to them in languages other than their own and that, conversely, they can disseminate their own information to people who do not speak their language. This is the problem of transferring information between languages, i.e. translation.

More precisely, the negative impact of multilingualism is doubled for European economic agents:

as producers of goods and services, they run up against additional obstacles when they want to export, which causes loss of time and money and, as a consequence, makes them less competitive;

as consumers of goods and services, they find it difficult to get information about the most recent technical developments and to acquire the most modern equipment, which holds back their technological development and, again, makes them less competitive.

By contrast, being the only important economic and industrial block in the world to have been forced to find a solution to such problems could also give Europe a considerable economic advantage: it has the unique opportunity to acquire precious skills in handling languages, which it could make use of economically (directly, by selling experience and techniques; indirectly, by more easily overcoming linguistic barriers in its relations with outside economic partners: USSR, China, the Arab world, Latin America, etc.) and socially (by applying its skills to integrating the handicapped, etc.) in monolingual as well as multilingual activities.

The healthy and profitable development of language industries will ensure that Europe keeps this world dominance for a long time to come.