If you’ve just started out as a freelance translator, you’re probably wondering how many clients you really need to run a successful and viable translation business. The short answer to this question is that you don’t need 100 clients to build a viable freelance business. In fact, you don’t need many at all – you probably only need between four and seven regular clients, with other occasional clients filling in the gaps.

You’ll find that most of your income will come from your top 4 to 7 clients and, while it’s important that you don’t become too reliant on any specific client, your A-list clients are your most important ones. They’ll provide the majority of your work (and income); they know and trust you and your work, and they require less administrative time and effort because you already know these clients from working together in the past.

Think Quality, Not Quantity!

So when it comes to establishing your freelance translation business, our suggestion is to think small: it’s better than thinking big and becoming unnecessarily discouraged. Think three main clients – perhaps five, and maybe even 10.

Did you know that, according to the American Bar Foundation, there are more than 47,000 law firms in the United States? Let’s say your area of expertise is in legal translations: if 99% of law firms in the United States don’t work with your language pair; perhaps they already have a translator they prefer to work with, or they don’t have any translation requirements of all; this still leaves you with 470 clients! Looking at these figures means that we still have to hope that most of these law firms won’t need you, because you’ll still have too many clients!

Obviously, the above is an extreme example, but we are trying to make the point here that you only need a very small number of clients, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find the small number of clients that you actually need to make your translation business a viable proposition.