A pan-EU Eurobarometer survey shows that while 90% of Internet surfers in the EU prefer to access websites in their own language, 55% at least occasionally use a language other than their own when online.

Other survey's conclusion is that, on average, one out of two Internet users in twenty three Member States uses a language other than their own to read online. However this figure hides great variations as between 90 and 93% of Greeks, Slovenes, Luxembourgers, Maltese and Cypriots indicated they would use other languages when online, but only 9% of UK citizens, 11% of Irish, 23% of Czechs and 25% of Italians said they would do so. On the other hand, the survey confirms that English is the most commonly used language when it comes to reading and watching content on the Internet in a different language than one's own: almost half of Internet users in the EU would use English at least occasionally while Spanish, German and French would be used by 4% to 6% of users.

In addition, according to the survey, while there is a huge amount of quality online content available, not everyone can use it to equal advantage, due to varying language skills. In fact, 44% of European Internet users feel they are missing interesting information because web pages are not in a language that they understand and only 18% buy products online in a foreign language.

The results underline the need for investment in online translation tools so that EU Internet users are not excluded from finding information or products online because they lack the language skills. Among the projects, the iTRANSLATE4 project is developing the first internet portal providing access to free online translation between more than 50 European and world languages, and allows users to simultaneously compare different translation results given by the most commonly used tools (e.g. Google, Bing, Systran, Trident, Linguatec). The EU's contribution to this project is €2 million. There is also the META-NET project, with EU support of €6 million, is building a technology alliance (already over 200 members) for multilingual Europe.

The European Commission currently manages 30 research and innovation projects promoting language technologies that can help Internet users to access information in other languages in the framework of the Digital Agenda.