Docs translation strategy: automated or community-driven?

[felixx-sp]

ESPAlert currently maintains bilingual documentation (Spanish 🇪🇸 + English 🇬🇧), but keeping both versions in sync manually is unsustainable as the project grows.

I'm evaluating two approaches and would love community input:

Option A — Automated translation (Crowdin + GitHub integration)

• Auto-syncs docs on every commit
• Consistent terminology via translation memory
• Easy to scale to more languages (French, German, Portuguese...)
• Risk: machine translation may lose technical nuance

Option B — Community-driven translation

• Human translators contribute via PRs
• Higher quality, especially for technical terms
• Slower and depends on volunteer availability

Option C — Hybrid

• Crowdin handles the first draft automatically
• Community reviewers validate and correct

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Some context: ESPAlert is currently focused on Spain but the architecture is designed to scale across Europe, so multilingual docs will become increasingly important.

Questions for the community

• Have you worked with Crowdin or similar tools in open source projects?
• Any experience with automated translation for technical docs?
• Would you be interested in contributing as a translator for your language?

All input welcome 🙌