AFAICT the German community has its "own" TN, which is https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Projektneuheiten, and is actively followed by over 2 hundred people.
I've actually found this page possibly more useful than the movement one, as it usually lists changes only if/when relevant to that wiki.
I think @Raymond and others have always done a great work there, and I'd rather like to see a local resource improved, if it's deemed necessary.

Local resource improved, totally! And if it is showing how the global resource could be improved, all the better.

In this case, part of the solution to this task is that German-speaking contributors are more aware of Projektneuheiten and the fact that there they can learn about about 'what software news are coming from the Foundation', among other things.

Now is when I begin to feel embarrassed and ask "isn't Tech/News being translated into German?" Adding @Johan so he's aware.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/2015/40 has no Deutsch translation, although it is interesting to discover that I'm not that bad at reading Ripoarisch. :)

In addition to my comment above, I'd like to provide another data point that over 70 people do view Tech News at de.wiki even though it's in English. Anyway, I linked this task at https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:Projektneuheiten#Feedback_welcome.21 .

I don't have the perfect solution, and definitely the German-speaking communities will know better what is good for them. Questions:

• Would a German translation of Tech News help existing German-speaking tech news services to publish and recycle more content and better?
• Would a German translation of Tech News contribute to a better connection between German-speaking readers and the Wikimedia tech community, reducing the perceived problem of 'lack of information'?

I also wonder whether this would help minimally improving this perception of 'development' being something distant, foreign, happening in 'San Francisco', but that is probably too deep with roots somewhere else.

Some remarks:

• There is also a gap between German nerds and German regular authors.
  • Authors want to edit article content and want very powerful tools which do all their work by one single click, but they don't want to be bothered with details and background and explanations. I think this goes for other languages and communities as well.
• The Projektneuheiten provides for more than a decade now a TechNews in a nutshell. The weekly report is split into two subsections, "for everybody" (Jedermann) and "for programmers".
  • That page is not only watched, the current week section is also distributed weekly to the talk pages of nearly 300 users (Ausrufer=Weekly Herald).
  • However, Projektneuheiten is focussing on things that are happening right now or came into effect last week, and crystal bowl matters are unusual.
• The lack in German would be to get an idea of the targets and long term development in Mediawiki and how that affects future work in the community.
  • The problem is to get involved and to forward viewpoints of a content author at an early stage, when design decisions are not terminated, and to contribute with limited experience: explaining things to developers, writing in English (most people in German speaking countries are able to read and understand English quite well, but computer stuff is ugly both in German and English).
  • For this reason a German version of the TechNews would be valuable.
  • Technical details are less interesting in a German issue, since the people dealing with that work on Phabricator, read the English TechNews or know where and how to get further information.
  • Perhaps an editorial of the TechNews would be sufficient; those parts telling perspectives and epics on a low-tech level, omitting "configuration parameter XY in procedure YZ got a new option".

+1 to the comment of @PerfektesChaos. /Projektneuheiten// already covers recent/current changes but it would be great to provide a basic overview on quarterly and long term development plans. Example: a project like https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps/Production_maps_cluster and the possible future plans within the maps project would be valuable news also in an early stage, as a lot of people are very interested in a proper OSM integration and better conditions for geohack tools since many years.

On communication: I've uploaded the English version of the Technical Wishes Concept - https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8d/WMDE_Technical_Wishes_Concept.pdf. Maybe it's useful for this discussion (and for other occasions).

In T113213#1692550, @PerfektesChaos wrote:

• Perhaps an editorial of the TechNews would be sufficient; those parts telling perspectives and epics on a low-tech level, omitting "configuration parameter XY in procedure YZ got a new option".

Some parts of TechNews are repetitive. I believe, regular readers of a German edition would be bored and dislike repetitions every week despite they are needed for new readers.

On 01.10.2015 11:33, Qgil wrote:

• Would a German translation of Tech News help existing German-speaking tech news services to publish and recycle more content and better?

Most German tech-savvy people read English. Very many are fluent.

• Would a German translation of Tech News contribute to a better connection between German-speaking readers and the Wikimedia tech community, reducing the perceived problem of 'lack of information'?

At least not much, I think, since we have 'Projektneuheiten' (That is my personal opinion with a possible bias)

I decided for myself not to translate Tech News to German, because I feel it is hardly worth my limited time. Also, many others can do it equally well, who did not jump in.

Btw., Ripuarian has a much more limited audience than German, yet there are hardly any translators but me, and I see translating as a good way to build parallel corpora as a by-product. Material which I can use for glossary building now and for machine aided translation later.

This conversation is very interesting, and it hope it helps improving Tech News itself. Specifically:

• Notices about future plans are welcome!
• There is repetitive information that doesn't tell much to the regular user, but probably needs to be published anyway (a new version of MediaWiki has been deployed etc etc). However, maybe we can organize contents in a way that the information likely to interest more editors sits at the top, while i.e. the "repetitive" data is at the bottom.

This, in turn, might help focusing translation efforts not just for German speakers, but for everybody. Every single line of English text counts when it is supposed to be translated to more than 17 languages.

I will keep reading and contributing to Tech News with these elements in mind.

So I've been looking at this for a couple of weeks and spoken to a few Germans about it, and I pretty much agree with what has been said above: Tech News isn't distributed in German mainly because the Germans don't need it. They are certainly aware of its existence (Projektneuheiten has a subpage for Tech News, for example), but since the German community is already doing fine, there's no need to disturb their workflow. While a fairly large part of the German population (30>%) doesn't speak English, this is far more unusual among those with a lot of interest in and knowledge about technology, so I doubt it would make much sense to translate to German just to make sure someone could rephrase it in Projektneuheiten.

To find a nice way of marking up both recurring items and those of interest only to developers has been on my to-do list "whenever I get those two extra hours" for a few weeks now. One thing that has been suggested is to mark it with some sort of small symbol instead of new sections, as the existing sections (recent changes, changes this week, problems, meetings, future changes, and maybe we should add something for strategy if that's something that people would like to see more of) sometimes divided by recurring items and mainly of interest to developers ... well, we'd have a lot of headlines.

Alright, as reporter of this task a) I have learned a lot and b) I'm confident that this question is in good hands. Thank you!

I translated 41 and 42, and can help to translate the next news, if wished.

In T113213#1718436, @Luke081515 wrote:

I translated 41 and 42, and can help to translate the next news, if wished.

Go on, if you like!

In T113213#1718436, @Luke081515 wrote:

I translated 41 and 42, and can help to translate the next news, if wished.

It's deeply appreciated!