Dan Drinkard and his fellow programmers are constantly juggling projects that add value to the paper's reporting on the web
Development of a tool that would allow WashingtonPost.com visitors to read tweets written in Russian came after an offhand comment from Cory Haik. In fact, when I interviewed the deputy editor of universal news in her office last week, she couldn't quite remember how her idea had been relayed to one of the news producers on the Washington Post team. All she knows is that a few hours later, the app was finished and had launched on the site.
It was late January when news broke of a Moscow airport explosion that killed dozens of people and injured hundreds more. Haik was at the Post's news hub, and as the AP reports streamed in and the paper's own coverage began to take shape, one of the correspondents mentioned to the editor all the information flooding through social media channels. "All of the stuff we were looking at was in Russian," Haik told me. "So it was sort of a no-brainer for me to say: 'I really wish there was some way to automatically translate this and we could run that live on our site. That would be really helpful.'"
That task initially fell on James Buck, a web producer for the Post. He first searched the web for a Twitter widget that utilized translation software. When he couldn't find one, Buck set out to create one himself. The idea was simple: Take a basic Twitter blog widget and drop Google Translate code into it. But the first attempt didn't work properly. "The problem was initially the JavaScript for the Google Translate was trying to render before the JavaScript for the Twitter widget, so the order of operations was wrong," he explained. In other words, Google Translate was trying to translate the tweets before they were even loaded into the stream.