The catalan wikipedia has a bot that makes automatic translations ca:Usuari:Amical-bot. Users of catalan wikipedia makes requests to the bot, and the bot gives them a translation were all the wiki formatting has been respected. Then the users go over the translation to fix all the mistakes and bad wordings from the automatic translation.  

 There is no need for paid translators as long as there are volunteers willing to do this work for free. And those volunteers might refuse to do this work if someone gets paid to make it...... Government subventions should be fine, but private payments from the WMF will just cause volunteers to abandon the project in mass.