Tuesday, March 9, 2010

Resumes

Lately I have been working on translating my resume from English to French. Of course I can't just translate the words and have the resume coming out all peachy, there is different phrasing that has to be accomplished as well. There are also many little pieces of information that must be added to a resume that would NEVER be present in the US.
First, French resumes (called CVs here) include a color headshot picture in the upper right corner. Additional information added to the personal data includes my age, my marital status and my nationality. Not so worried about discrimination here I guess.
Then, in the body of the resume, the French put company and school logos next to their, well obviously, companies and schools. While this seems like nothing big, fitting those little buggers in next to the text is proving to be quite annoying. Dumb formatting.
Also, something that is much more common here is listing of languages. Probably because most people in the States speak English and then maybe kinda, sorta speak another language this section isn't big at home. Here? People have to make sure their knowledge of English is present and most of the time, they have minor knowledge of other languages as well, so they get to highlight this in this section.
Resumes here are also much shorter. Instead of really powerful two-line statements, their job description statements are about 6 words. That's a lot to convey in a short time. I'm almost finished with my initial translation. Next step, get one of my nice French friends to tell me all the things I did wrong. Yikes.

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