Straker uses a hybrid (machine/human combination) translation approach, which gives the translations a more human touch, but it’s fast! The rates are standard for the 20 or so most common languages of commerce, with some modified pricing for the more esoteric. For example, Arabic, Spanish, and French are standard, Burmese is nonstandard.

All you need to do to start is sign up for an account. After you input your MailChimp API Key, you’ll be able to see all of your campaign drafts within the Straker Dashboard, and you can quickly get a quote.

Choose your base language, along with your target language(s) and type of translation.

You then get a window to finalize your translation request, view the price, and make any special notes on who the campaign is targeting or notes on the tone (at MailChimp we always use the informal “tu” form when doing Spanish translations).

After submitting you’ll wait for notification as to when your translation is finished. According to Straker, the average turnaround time for newsletter to go from English to Spanish is 35 minutes, so it’s not a long time but it would be wise to plan ahead.

Once it’s done you can review it within Straker, decide to accept or dispute the translation, and then create a MailChimp Campaign to have a copy of it appear as a new draft within your MailChimp Dashboard.

We hope this makes it easy for you to reach customers all around the world!

Check out Straker Translations

We love startups, and we’re happy our Forever Free plan makes it possible for companies with small budgets to send great looking emails.

*|RSS:RECENT|* 

This will tell MailChimp to insert links to your 5 most recently published articles from your blog. 

If you want, you can hack that merge tag a little bit like this:

*|RSS:RECENT10|*

to insert links to the 10 most recent articles instead.

Just add a little snippet of JavaScript code to your web page, and we’ll display an automatically updating count of your subscribers.

Before, if your recipients hovered their mouse over those links, they’d see MailChimp’s domains (actually, we made them look pretty generic, like “foward-to-friend.com” or list-manage.com).

Some people told us they were too generic, and some others (really paranoid people) told us they looked a little suspicious. Good point. So we changed them to automatically include your own company name in front, as a subdomain. It’s a nice little touch to help make your emails look even more professional and trustworthy.

We’ve also re-designed the MonkeyRewards Dashboard that’s in your MailChimp account, so you can get better insight into just how much monkey love you’re spreading. Click on the thumbnail to zoom in on the screenshot. Enhancements include:

1. Credits Earned box, showing you how much credit you’ve earned this month, and in total
2. Inbox Inspections Earned box, showing you how many inbox inspections you’ve earned this month and in total
3. Email Notification option, which will send you an email whenever you’ve earned rewards
4. Refer-ee List, showing you how many of your friends signed up
5. Rewards Applied list, which details how you’ve spent all those credits you’ve earned

The MonkeyRewards program is really easy. All you have to do is add a little MailChimp badge to your email campaign, and/or your signup forms. Some people have been adding it to their websites, even. And that’s all you have to do. We’ll track all clicks from the badge, so we can reward you automatically. Plus, the badges don’t suck. Besides, admit it—you’ve been looking for some excuse to include a monkey somewhere in your email campaigns. Now you can earn rewards for it!

In MailChimp v3.2, which is going live on August 11th, the entire opt-in process built into MailChimp will be available in 16.5 different languages:

By the way, that “16.5″ is not a typo. See, one of the “pseudo” languages we’ve added is Chimplish...And unfortunately, Chimplish is not (yet) available in Google Translate. So in order to add Chimplish to our supported languages, our lead engineer Chad spent countless hours listening to archived chimpanzee recordings, re-runs of Wild Kingdom, and an old VHS tape of Every Which Way But Loose, set on infinite repeat.He ate nothing but bananas, nuts, and ants for weeks, and he slowly began to decode the simple yet elegantly sophisticated language of chimpanzees. It wasn’t easy, considering there are apparently at least 32 different dialects of Chimplish, each with their own type of slang (we went with East Coast Chimplish, because we felt West Coast Chimplish was too “stuck up”). There’s a picture of Chad above, just before he went insane. We last saw him scurrying out the door on all fours, and we haven’t seen him since.By the way, you don’t wanna know what Jesse, our API Engineer, did to learn LOLCODE.

Don’t see your language on the list? Post a comment below, and we’ll get it added.

At MailChimp, we’ve had to shut down quite a few creative agencies for their client’s bad email habits. Sadly, most problems could have been easily prevented.

We’ve posted a free PDF guide (9 pages): Warning Signs Your Client Is Spamming.

The free downloadable guide covers how to tell if your client is crossing the line, and how to gently guide them back over from the dark side (without losing the project). More specifically, we go over:

• The most common reasons we’ve had to shut down agency accounts at MailChimp
• The industries (your clients) that always seem to have the most risk (and why)
• How to define spam in words your client will understand, and how to determine when a client just needs a punch in the gut
• How to detect inexperienced clients who may be doing things to get themselves (and you) in trouble