[1] The goal of the project as to create machine translation system for the official languages of the European Community, which at the time were Danish, Dutch, German, English, French, Italian, later including Greek, Spanish and Portuguese.
[2] However, as time passed, expectations became tempered; "Fully Automatic High Quality Translation" was not a reasonably attainable goal.
As more countries joined, this produced a combinatorial explosion in the number of language pairs involved, and the need to translate every paper, speech and even set of meeting minutes produced by the EU into the other eight languages meant that translation rapidly became the overwhelming component in the administrative budget.
The first "live" translation occupied a 4Mb Microvax running Ultrix and C-Prolog for a complete weekend some time in early 1987.
While Eurotra never delivered a "working" MT system, the project made a far-reaching long-term impact on the nascent language industries in European member states, in particular among the southern countries of Greece, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.