User blog comment:Luchofigo85/Introducing the International Volunteer Team/@comment-5.83.15.90-20160729165035/@comment-4142476-20160801095256

We love doing it though; we basically get tools to help out users in our own language more easily. (Also, we do get "paid" once a year... in chocolate or other gifts :D)

Any for-profit company will usually only hire professional translators/support people in the profitable languages (e.g. the big or more popular ones). With Wikia having wikis in roughly ~200 languages iirc, I think hiring one person for every language is just impossible. Currently, Staff covers around 10 languages and the IVT does too (with overlap), so we can both translate and help users faster.

Compared to other companies, which basically choose "we're going to have an official translation in language X but not in language Y", Wikia allows users to freely create wikis in a lot of languages, which logically means a bit of a different setup for internationalisation.