In this article, we outline the contents of the linguistic specifications of the Eurotra machine translation system. We start in sections 1 and 2 from some of the requirements placed by multilingual MT on the overall design of the linguistic components. We then move on to a characterization of the Eurotra interface structure (section 3), the nature of transfer (section 4), and trends towards more interlingual representations within the project (section 5). Thereafter, we concentrate on the contents of the various levels beside the interface structure (section 6) before giving a brief survey of word structure (section 7) and outlining some areas for further research (section 8)¹.