[wichert]

Reading the article they are not generated files, but files that are never touched by developers. Translators will work with those files. I expect that for translators they have a different sparse checkout that only fetches .xlf files for their target languages.

[onion2k]

xlf files are usually generated. They're XML. No one wants to write that by hand.

[lultimouomo]

Also plain text files are usually generated. They are arrays of 1s and 0s. No one wants to write that by hand.

I think that this is not a sensible definition of a generated file. A more sensible definition is that a generated file is created automatically from some source, which is not user input (i.e. an other file). This means generated files do not need to be kept under git, as long as their source is checked in.

Translations files, even if they are not created with a plain text editor but with some other tool that handles the XML layer, are clearly not generated, as long as the translation is done by a human.

[Xylakant]

.docx files are archives of xml-files. No one wants to write that by hand.

Or, in more words: The format of the files is just the representation on disk - it’s not directly connected to how the files are generated or edited. XML files can be written by hand with suitable editor support.