I want to work as a freelance translator, which languages should I learn?

Based on current estimates accdg. to Wikipedia: Chinese-Mandarin 1.026Billion, Spanish 466Million, Hindi 380Million, Arabic 353.5Million, Russian 272Million, Bengali 250Million, Portuguese 217Million, Indonesian 163Million, Swahili 140Million, Japanese 123Million, French 118.5Million and so on.

As someone who works at a professional translation company (http://translationcloud.com/) to be exact, fyi, here are my thoughts on your question. If you would like to be a freelance translator, I would stick with being a translator for one language pair, into your native language.  If you are thinking about learning a new language first, you can hold off on your translation career for about 5 - 10 years until you are fluent enough to be able to translate well.  Otherwise you will just be delivering sub-par translations, and you will not be successful.   It takes an in-depth knowledge of a language to be able to translate documents.   Most are pretty technical, regardless of the subject matter, and the chances of doing translation projects that are just personal letters (the only thing you could probably translate accurately enough as a new language learner) are slim to none. Being a good translator is a hard job, and if you are going to do it, you might as well do it right.  I would stick with translating English to German.  Otherwise you're going to wind up disappointing a lot of people and/or translation companies, as quality is the number one factor.

That’s a tough question. I haven’t seen one language share more jobs over another. It might help if you set up shop first.What I mean by that is joining a freelancer website like https://golance.com/signup/r/BdV6Kgk1G. Here you can upload your resume, work samples, bio, clear image, the works. The more you have completed the better off you will be when prospects go check out your profile.Now in your case, you’re trying to figure out which language to focus on. In this case, I would consider while checking out gigs posted on goLance that are for translation you come up with other skills you can market.It sounds to me like you’re determined and smart enough if you’re open to learning any language that learning other marketable skills would help you.In this case, consider editing and copywriting gigs. These are a lot more common and needed positions that have to be filled with talented people. This might be a niche you can kick butt in.Let me know when you create an account on https://golance.com/signup/r/BdV6Kgk1G it’d be cool to check it out.Good luck!