In this article, an outline is provided the contents of the linguistic specifications of the Eurotra machine translation system. Sections 1 and 2 discuss some of the requirements placed by multilingual MT on the overall design of the linguistic components. The authors 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, the focus in 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).