Translating your resume for another country

What should change, and what must not

Translate the human writing: your summary, job titles, bullets, degree names, skill group names and anything describing what you did.

Leave alone the things that are names or data: your own name, employer and university names, product and technology names, email addresses, phone numbers, links and dates. Translating Emirates or Python helps nobody and makes the document harder to verify.

Machine translation is not the problem; unreviewed translation is

Translation tools handle straightforward professional prose well. Where they fail is job titles and industry idiom - Chartered Accountant, Managing Director and Head of Growth all have conventional local equivalents that a literal translation misses.

Have a native speaker read the top third: the summary, your current title and the first three bullets. That is the part that decides whether anyone reads the rest, and it takes them five minutes.

Translating here

On your dashboard, press Translate on a resume and pick a language. It creates a translated copy, leaving the original untouched, and your name, contact details, links and dates are carried over exactly rather than trusted to the model.

Section headings translate too, so an Arabic resume says the Arabic word for Experience rather than the English one - which is the detail most translated CVs get wrong.

• Arabic and Urdu resumes lay out right to left automatically.
• The copy keeps its own template, score and share link, so you can send it independently.
• Every language is a separate resume in your dashboard - no version confusion.

Which language to send

For most private-sector roles in the Gulf, English is the working language and an English CV is correct. For government and semi-government roles in Saudi Arabia, an Arabic version alongside helps. In Germany, France, Spain and Italy, a local-language CV is expected unless the advert is in English.

When in doubt, match the language of the job advert. That is the clearest signal you have about the language the hiring team works in.

Downloading a translated resume

Latin-script languages, Turkish, Polish and Russian export to PDF normally. Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and the CJK languages are saved through your browser's own print dialog, which shapes those scripts correctly where a generated PDF does not.

When the print window opens, choose Save as PDF as the printer. The result is identical to what you see on screen.

Check these before sending a translated CV

Four things go wrong most often, and all four are quick to check.

• Job titles - confirm the local equivalent rather than the literal translation.
• Degree names - a Bachelor of Technology is not the same as a local engineering degree; keep the original and add an explanation if needed.
• Dates - some languages and countries write them differently; spell the month out.
• Your name - unchanged, in the spelling that matches your passport.

Keeping both versions in step

When you update the original - a new role, a new number - translate it again rather than editing the translated copy by hand. Editing two documents separately is how they drift, and a contradiction between versions is noticed at exactly the wrong moment.

Each translated copy is its own resume here, so you can keep last year's Arabic version while the English one moves on, and delete it when it is out of date.