Do people actually use Fluent? When I showed it to some professional translators, the reaction was along the lines of: “Hmm, interesting, but does it fit into my existing [roughly speaking XLIFF] tooling? No? Then no.” More generally, a technical translator’s flow is turning a table of strings into a table of strings with minimal distractions and the occasonal look at the reference; I’m not sure Fluent—however nice it looks—facilitates that.

Mostly not, but the formats and limited available tooling is designed to dovetail with existing offerings. Adoption is extremely low despite fairly easy implementation of most features.

Really? So if the software I want localized uses Fluent, do I have ways to work with translators who use Trados or Transit or Déjà Vu or memoQ or whatnot? My initial impression was that Fluent’s data model is way, way too fancy for any of these (or for interoperability via XLIFF or TMX, imperfect as it is), but I’d be happy to learn I was wrong.