Translators who are new to the translation industry can often be unsure about when to say ‘no’ to clients who are offering them translation work. This can be a difficult decision to make because our job as freelance translators is to accept work in order to keep our freelance business viable, but sometimes we have to refuse work if the work is outside our area of expertise or simply because we’re endeavoring to maintain our quality of life (sanity!)

Below we’ve listed our advice on how to refuse a translation project without damaging your future relationship with the client.

Be Honest With Your Client

If you’re offered a translation project with an unrealistic deadline, or the project is on a topic that’s outside your area of expertise, it’s important that you discuss this with the client and let them know about your concerns. Discussing this with your client helps to create an honest relationship, and then with future projects that you do accept your client will be more likely to believe that you’re capable of handling their project. Let’s say that the project involved contains very technical or scientific information and you believe you’ll be out of your depth working on this document. We suggest that you tell your client that this is not your area of specialization and that they’d achieve a better result if they use a translator who works in that specific area. If it’s the deadline that’s the issue for you, explain to your client that the deadline is unrealistic for you to deliver quality work and that you’re not capable of handling that quantity of work in such a short amount of time. Say that you’d really appreciate it if they would extend the deadline to accommodate your needs. Remember, if you don’t ask, you don’t get!

Teaching Your Clients to Trust You

Offering this tactic as evidence to new clients is one great advantage of this strategy. By this, we mean that if you really want a certain project and the client seems unsure about using you, you can tell them honestly that you quite often turn down work that’s outside your area of expertise, or that you never accept work if you believe that you can’t produce a high-quality translation. Add that you would not even quote on a project if you weren’t extremely confident in your ability to produce an accurate and high-quality translation. This tells the potential client that you don’t automatically agree to any translation project that’s offered to you.