From its inception, the European Community has adhered to the principle of equal treatment of all Communitiy languages. The translation needs within the EEC institutiona are hence large and growing. The mistmach between the demand for translation and the affordable resources --both human and financial-- lead the Commission to try to enhance the productivity of the translation services by providing them with more powerful tools, such as electronic dictionaries, terminological databases, text formatting devices and, ideally, machine translation (MT) systems. Thus, the Commission decided in 1978 to launch a European R&D project in MT. The project was given the name Eurotra and a group of representatives from some thirty European universities and research centers was formed for its preparation. It took this group and the Commission services four years to get the approval of the European Parlament for an R&D programme for the creation of a prototype translation system for all Community languages. It was further stipulated that the system should be of advanced design, that it should be geared to the translation of official EEC documents within the domain of information technologY, and that the dictionaries should contain approximately 20.000 entries.

A second but equally important aim of the Eurotra programme was the encouragement of research and education in the areas of computational linguistics, natural language processing and machine translation within the EEC.

The Eurotra Programme has been running from 1985 to 1992, with coordinated work going on in every country of the Community, and total investment amounted up to 37,5 million ECU's. Some 16 Centers were established or enhanced, and at its peak there were some 200 research workers, largely computational linguists, working in those Centres to a common programme tackling the nine official languages an 72 language pairs of the Community.