Multilingualism has been consistently supported in Europe through instruments such as normative acts of the Council of Europe and EU institutions, and promoted as a social phenomenon. This competence is manifested on different levels, in form of parallel texts, internationalization of higher education, and everyday language communication for professional and personal purposes. Rich databases of documents and their translations created for the needs of European and international institutions have long been a source of linguistic research.
It is therefore important to examine this phenomenon both from the point of view of EU policies and contemporary trends in linguistics. Indeed, as tertium comparationis we chose lexical non-equivalence, understood as vocabulary that cannot be converted from a source language into the target language by means of a single word or a whole expression (descriptive meaning). This aspect of language has been of great importance in linguistics, in particular in translation studies, which have to take into consideration the cultural specificity of a given lexical society. Otherwise, it would be difficult to produce accurate translations, since linguistic representation of the world, indispensable element of every translation, is closely related to lexical equivalence. In terms of intercultural understanding a question arises, whether a truly reliable translation can be produced to avoid profound anomalies in communication.