Translating a Resume into English: What Not to Translate Literally
Degrees, job titles and company names are what a literal translation damages most. What to write where no equivalent exists, and how to check the finished file.
A translated resume rarely breaks on ordinary words. It breaks in three places where no equivalent exists: degrees, job titles, and company names. The rest is normal editing.
This article is about what to write where there is no exact match, and how to check the file afterwards.
Degrees: name it, don’t equate it
This is the main place where people say something untrue without meaning to.
Educational qualifications have no clean mapping between countries, and attempts to find one drift in a single direction — upward. A five-year specialist diploma becomes a Master’s, a national doctoral degree becomes a PhD, a technical qualification becomes a Bachelor’s. Each step feels small, and each one puts a claim in the document that you cannot support if asked.
The reliable approach is to name the qualification as it is called, and add what can be said factually about it: how long the programme ran, in what field, at what institution, finished in what year. That is enough for a reader to place the level, and none of it has to be retracted later.
One thing worth knowing before you agonise over the wording: equivalence is not your job. Formal recognition of a qualification is done by evaluating bodies or by the employer, under their own rules, and it is a separate process from translating a resume. If an employer needs an equivalence, they will say which procedure they want. A word guessed on a resume does not stand in for that procedure, and can contradict it.
Job titles: the name translates, the level does not
Machine translation handles words well and hierarchy not at all. “Leading specialist” becomes senior specialist, “chief specialist” becomes chief specialist, and both read as weightier than they meant. It can go the other way just as unfairly: a role with real responsibility flattens into a colourless officer.
The underlying problem is that English-language ladders differ between companies, never mind between countries. Senior means six years of experience at one employer and the second rung of seven at another.
So describe the scope rather than hunting for a rank:
- how many people reported to you, if any;
- what was actually in your remit — a function, a region, a product, a budget;
- who you reported to.
One sentence of scope says more than any guessed title. It is the same principle as the keep, rewrite and remove decisions: a translated or clarified job title should be explained rather than inflated.
Company names: the name plus one line
A company name that means something at home may mean nothing abroad — not the industry, not the size, not whether anyone has heard of it.
The order of operations is simple. If the company has its own English name, the one it uses on its own site, use that, so a reader can find it. If it does not, transliterate and add a short descriptor beside it: what it does, roughly how big it is. The legal form can go; “LLC” or its local equivalent carries no information for a resume reader.
Same logic for universities. The institution’s official English name, where its own site gives one, beats your transliteration, because it can be verified.
Dates: remove the ambiguity
03.04.2024 is either 3 April or 4 March, depending on where the reader is. This is the only mistake in this list that cannot be spotted in the finished document, because both readings look correct.
Spell the month — April 2024, Mar 2021 – Jan 2023. If you need a full date, a year-first format works too: 2024-04-03.
Your name: one spelling everywhere
The transliteration of your name on your passport, in your LinkedIn profile, in your email address and on your resume can differ — and often does, because they were written at different times under different conventions.
For a reader this is not a detail: if the resume says Aleksei, the profile says Alexey and the email says alexei, connecting the three documents to one person becomes work nobody is obliged to do. A profile link on a resume only works when there is a recognisable name on the other side.
Pick one spelling — the passport version is the simplest choice, since it will match visa and offer paperwork — and bring the rest into line.
What machine translation gets wrong specifically here
Beyond the seniority problem, a few things recur.
“Duties included.” The stock phrase that opens a responsibility list in many languages translates literally into exactly the padding an English resume should drop. Write the action instead.
Bureaucratic phrasing stays bureaucratic. “Carried out the coordination of interaction between departments” translates into an equally heavy English sentence. Translate the meaning: what you did, and with whom.
Field terms get rendered descriptively. A specialism, a tool, or a process that has an accepted English name may come back as a paraphrase — and a paraphrase is a term nobody searches for. Check the terms you want to be found under the same way you check resume keywords: connect the term to work you can describe.
In ExportMyResume, translation into English is part of the general Improve with AI pass, which requires sign-in and has daily limits. The important thing about it is the same as for any other tool: review the proposed edits before applying them. A translation does not verify a date, a degree name, or a seniority level — it rewrites them.
Checking the finished file
Three checks, a couple of minutes, and they catch most of it.
Leftover characters from the original alphabet. Copy the whole text out of the finished PDF into a plain-text editor and search for them. They turn up in unexpected places: a city name, a certificate title, a filename that ended up in a header. The nastiest case is a single character from the other alphabet inside an otherwise English word, which looks fine and quietly breaks any search for that word.
No font substitution. The same paste into a plain-text editor shows boxes and question marks where a font could not cope. That is step 5 of the readability protocol, and it matters more in a translated document than a native one, because you may still have one character from another script in the text.
Dates and numbers. Walk the dates again in the English file. Translation is exactly when a format slips, because individual lines were edited rather than the whole block.
If you are producing a Word file, check the line breaks after translating: an English sentence is almost never the same length as the original, so open the finished DOCX before sending it.
If you are also translating the LinkedIn profile
LinkedIn supports separate language versions of a profile, which is not the same job as translating a resume: the profile is also read by people searching for you in your own language. If you add an English version, keep the facts identical — dates, names, level of responsibility — and don’t paste the translated resume summary into the About section: the two have different audiences, and nineteen worked examples show how they differ.
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