Sep 18, 2011

Translate MailChimp Signup Forms Your Way

MailChimp’s signup forms are already pre-translated to a few dozen languages. But some of our users want the ability to manually translate each piece of the process in their own way. So in v6.3, we did that. When you go in to your list’s form designer, you’ll notice a new “Translate” tab:

Click that tab, and you’ll see that we’ve broken down each opt-in step so that you can translate every string of text that we use. In my example below, I’m customizing for Spanish-Mexico (as opposed to Spanish-Spain):

 

 

Just a little example for me and you.

 

See also:

Posted By

Ben

Tagged

Discussion

  • Victor Jalbă-Șoimaru

    There still is some stuff Mc Hammered (can’t touch’em, can’t translate’em, can’t kill’em). I can provide some screen grabs.

    09.18.2011

    reply

      • Victor Jalbă-Șoimaru

        Here is the link with the screen grabs converted and merged into a three page *.pdf file link: http://www.prodtp.ro/binder-mailchimp.pdf. You can see there what I am unable to translate because the monkey is mean! And also I have just realised that some of my translations were not saved. I mean they were when I’ve done the job (earlier). But when I have logged in later some fields were still in english! Job done twice. Maybe now they won’t disappear again. Hope it helps.

        09.18.2011

      • Ben

        Ok, just received word that our devs have resolved this issue. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for telling us about this!

        09.22.2011

  • Shir Harel

    MailChimp – this is super awesome, and you are just making it easier and better to work in Israel with this awesome product. But I have to ask – if I’ve already specified “Hebrew” (and also, for that matter, Arabic, which you don’t have yet, which is strange…) why can’t the form also know to set itself into right-to-left?

    That’s the last step needed to completely integrate MailChimp into Hebrew. The day you do that, I will be truly worshipping the chimp gods (ok fine, I already do…)

    09.20.2011

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    • Shahar Or

      This is exactly what I wanted to ask. We would really enjoy this feature. Otherwise, we have to crawl into the code and make it RTL ourselves.

      09.22.2011

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      • premshay hermon

        I second that motion!
        Right-toLeft support is crucially needed (in the template editing as well)

        09.23.2011

    • Ben

      I just heard someone on our UX team discussing how we might accomplish this, but it sounded as though they were still in research mode. Not very helpful, I know — but just wanted to let you know we’re aware of that.

      09.22.2011

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      • Shmuel

        Hi Ben-
        Any updates about this?
        There are two main problems that I have right now, not actually with the sign-up form (which thanks to your awesome “Naked Form” I can work around), but rather with the Confirmation E-mail and all other forms for which I have to use your forms:
        1. Fields that I can’t edit at all, and thus can’t even center the text to at least have it not left-justified. These are the most frustrating. Take for example the Final “Welcome” E-mail: All of those fields are frozen on the left side of the page (also, how do I add an “update your details” button?).
        2. Fields that I CAN edit, but when I use the rtl css tag, still stay on the left. Why doesn’t that tag work within your forms? It appears to work inside the edit box, but then doesn’t get integrated properly into the form.

        I’m tearing my hair out here, so any help you have to offer would be MUCH appreciated.

        Thanks.

        12.27.2011

      • Raul Candia

        Hi Shmuel

        Trying to work in a LTR-centric environment can be very frustrating when your audience reads RTL. The good news is that there are some ways in which you can work around some of these limitations

        You can set the optin process to the advanced mode which then gives you access to the HTML code of most of the steps along the optin process (including the final welcome email). To do this:

        Click on the List Tab –> click on “forms” for the list you want to edit –> at the form builder screen click on “revert to old forms” button on the top left hand side –> at the next screen scroll to the bottom of the page and on the right hand side click “Advanced Mode” –> select the steps you wish to customize at the next screen.

        12.29.2011

  • Adam Debnar

    Hello, it is great. But it have still some bugs in it. After i have translated, it worked like charm. But when i get back to correct some spelling mistakes, it sets to default automatically. So i had to translate sentences again.

    09.21.2011

    reply

  • Matjaz

    Super! Super! I’ve been missing these feature. Now you’ve added!
    Great! Very appreciated!

    09.21.2011

    reply

  • Tatiana

    Hi, I have one “translation” problem. As I am in Russia My list is full of Cyrillic names and when I try to personalize To: field like *|FNAME|* *|SNAME|* I got at least in Outlook 2007 smth like Татьяна Голованова as it should be Татьяна Александровна Голованова

    09.21.2011

    reply

  • Gumbah

    This is awesome, but still a bit buggy! It seems to revert back to defaults at times? Last night I completely translated a whole signup process, but when i tested it this morning a couple of translations were set back to defaults!?

    This seems to be the same problem as Victor Jalbă-Șoimaru and Adam Debnar have. Can you please give us an update on why this may be happening?

    09.22.2011

    reply

    • Ben

      Ok, this should be fixed now. Sorry for the inconvenience.

      09.22.2011

      reply

  • Lau

    Awesome! Been waiting for this a long time!

    09.22.2011

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  • Eric Barrett

    Is it possible to add a language that is not in the list? I would like to translate into Georgia. If not, what is the best practice for using an existing language for a Georgian translation?

    09.22.2011

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    • Ben

      Hmm, are you able to use the new translation feature described above to just input your Georgian translation? The idea behind this was to not have to keep adding translations (which people never seemed 100% happy with anyway) and just allow users to translate themselves.

      09.22.2011

      reply

  • Terena Bell, In Every Language

    As a MailChimp customer AND the owner of a translation agency, I’m really curious to know how y’all are having the translations done. Are you using a Google API? If so, since Google’s starting to charge for that, will the charge be passed along to your users? I’d really love to learn more about the process & how it assures quality and affordability for your customers like me. Thank you.

    09.22.2011

    reply

    • Ben

      We hired a company with human translators for the default languages you see in MailChimp’s opt-in process.

      09.22.2011

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      • Andreas

        Hi there Ben, great initiative since we all are a bit picky with this sort of things, but I’m afraod I can confirm that the custom translation feature is still somewhat buggy. Like others above, we’ve gone through several rounds of translation only to find out that some of the translated strings keep reverting to the default english language. Could you fix it out soon please? It’s so annoying!

        09.22.2011

      • Ben

        Just minutes ago, we pushed a fix to that bug. Could you log out, log back in, and try again? Sorry for the inconvenience.

        09.22.2011

      • Andreas

        Yeah, it works! I’ve translated quite a few forms, have logged out and changed browsers a few times now and it has always worked out great. Thanks a lot Ben&Mailchimp, that’s what I call speed!

        09.22.2011

      • Ben

        Thanks for all your time reporting and testing!

        09.22.2011

  • Darius

    Is there any possibility to translate the emails sent to the subscribers? for example – email to subscriber to inform when he/she “unsubscribe”, or verification email, …
    Thank you

    09.22.2011

    reply

    • Ben

      Yes, that’s part of the subscription process that you can customize. In the screenshots above, you’d change the pulldown menu at the very top left from “signup form” to “unsubscribe email.”

      09.22.2011

      reply

      • Darius

        I found it. Thank you for your quick reply and awesome service. MailChimp ROCKS!

        09.22.2011

  • hai

    great job!
    it enables me to use mailchimp!

    09.22.2011

    reply

  • Jens

    Thanks, really needed!

    It really sucked in Danish – I sent you some suggestions for improvements half a year ago… But there was way to many bad translations for me to carry on…

    09.23.2011

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  • aaron

    Greetings,
    I am working on a website and my contact is missing the “submit” or “subscribe list” button at the bottom of the form. I copied all the code that was highlighted in my MailChimp acct. and still no luck. See test link here:

    http://www.jamesyounglawoffice.com/es/contactus.html

    Any thoughts on what’s happening with my form?

    Thanks!

    09.24.2011

    reply

    • Ben

      Aaron, this is something our support team would need to diagnose. I’ve FWD’d this on to them, and they’ll contact you via email.

      09.27.2011

      reply

  • Emili

    why must we “pick” custom translation button? I want to translate my forms to catalan using latin as default language. What happen if I picked the auto-translation button?

    09.28.2011

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    • Ben

      You would pick “custom translation” if the language you want is not already an option, or if the translations we provide are not to your liking. For example, the translations we have are sometimes too formal, or too casual, depending on the person who provided the translation for us.

      09.29.2011

      reply

      • Emili

        Thanks for the reply, Ben.
        I hope soon to have Catalan as an option to choose. Catalan is little known outside the areas where people speak because they do not have the support of any great state as an official language. But in the world are more than eleven million people understand it, and over 9 million that can speak.

        09.29.2011

  • RicoSmith_

    The translation is not being pulled through to Facebook. What can I do?

    05.13.2012

    reply

  • Thierry

    I set “dutch” as default and still in the footer of my campaigns I get the text “add us to your addresbook” in English. What do I do wrong?

    06.12.2012

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  • Will

    Is it possible, or is there any scope in the future to add your own translations advanced mode?
    Thanks

    08.23.2012

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    • John

      We’re always improving MailChimp to make it easier to use around the world, but pre-translated code for the advanced mode isn’t something we are working on right now. If the advanced mode isn’t quite powerful enough to meet your needs, you could always explore our API http://apidocs.mailchimp.com/ which would give you control over most anything to meet your translation requirements.

      09.12.2012

      reply

  • Varden

    But how can I change the list fields inside a tag? I mean, you can put whatever in “address” name, but I don’t find how to change the field “City”.
    Regards

    03.26.2013

    reply

    • John

      If you use the Advanced Forms: http://eepurl.com/lSY5 you can control the translation that way. Otherwise, your best option would be to create text fields for each address field you need (city, postal code, etc) and translate each one individually.

      04.01.2013

      reply

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