Docusaurus i18n: How to keep translations in sync (manual vs Crowdin vs GitHub Action)

If you maintain a Docusaurus site in more than one language, you already know the actual problem isn't translation — it's staying in sync . Someone updates three paragraphs in the English docs, and six months later the Chinese (or Spanish, or whatever) version is quietly wrong, and nobody notices until a user files an issue about it. I went looking at how teams actually solve this, and it mostly comes down to three approaches. Writing this down mostly for my own reference, but sharing in case it saves someone else the research. Approach 1: Just do it manually This is what most small-to-mid docs sites do, at least at first. A maintainer (or a translator on Slack) watches for doc PRs and manually updates the other language folders. It works fine until it doesn't. The failure mode is always the same: it's invisible. Nobody gets paged when a translated page goes stale — it just sits there, slightly wrong, until a reader notices the code sample doesn't match anymore. For a project with a handful of docs and one contributor doing translations, this is honestly fine. Past ~50-100 pages or more than one language, it stops scaling — not because the translation work is hard, but because tracking what changed becomes a full-time job nobody signed up for. Approach 2: A translation management platform (Crowdin, Lokalise, etc.) These are built for exactly this problem and they're genuinely good at it — string extraction, translator workflows, in-context editing, the works. If you have a dedicated localization team or professional translators involved, this is probably still the right call. The tradeoff for a docs-only, engineering-driven project: they're built around the assumption that there's a human translator (or a review pipeline) doing the actual translating, plus a separate sync step to pull translations back into your repo. That's the right tool when translation quality and nuance matter enormously (marketing copy, legal text) or when you have translators who aren't devel