Lingua German meets online for the first time on 4 June 2015.

Already before, the Lingua German community had tried to get together for regional meetings, but owing to the fact that the members of the Lingua German community are living in many different cities all over the world, it has been challenging to find an appropriate location for a meeting. Especially because just 60% of our community members live in Germany.

The Lingua German community in numbers, infographic by Anne Hemeda based on users stats.

So instead of a personal meeting a skype conference was organised and eight members from Manchester (England), Turin (Italy), Ebensee am Traunsee (Austria), Leipzig, Heidelberg, Bonn and Essen came virtually together.

We talked about the use of our google group and how and for which purposes the general community list could be used. Although our focus is on the work of our own community of translators, we discussed that we are also interested in getting more in touch with the translators of the other Lingua communities and the authors of the texts which are translated into German.

The group expressed especially the interest in questions and discussions concerning challenges we face during translating such as the correct translation of acronyms and abbreviations in tweets or the use of gender sensitive language.

The German Lingua community is very active at the moment. 48 members translated 647 articles in 2014 and in May 2015 we published 96 posts on our page. We translate mainly from English, but also Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Arabic. So far, our community can translate texts from 18 languages. We maintain different dossiers, five of them are continuously updated.

This first online meet up served as a kickoff for regular online meetings for our community. We will use conference calls for general meetings, to discuss specific topics, introduce new features and guidelines but also to talk about difficulties and challenges.

We are looking forward to a vigorous exchange within the Global Voices community!