Writing a resume in English as a non-native speaker: the translation traps

Translating your resume into English is not a language exercise, it is a change of conventions. An English-speaking recruiter spots a translated resume in seconds, rarely because of a grammar mistake: because of an unreadable degree name, a descriptive phrase where an action is expected, a false friend that shifts the meaning.

Degrees are not translated, they are explained

A French “Baccalauréat” rendered as “baccalaureate” means nothing in London, and “bachelor” would be wrong. The rule: keep the original name and explain it in brackets with its functional equivalent, “Licence (three-year university degree)”, “BTS (two-year technical diploma)”. Same gesture for schools: “Grande École” does not translate, “leading French engineering school” is understood. The recruiter does not need an official equivalence, they need to place the level in half a second.

Action verbs replace responsibilities

The French resume describes scopes: “en charge de la gestion des stocks”. The English resume recounts completed actions: “cut stock discrepancies by a third”. Every bullet opens with a past-tense verb, no subject: led, built, reduced, delivered. This conversion is not done word by word, it is done proof by proof: take each line and ask what was accomplished, with what measurable result. That is exactly what Aptenda's polishing pass does on French phrasing, and the invariant holds in both languages: nothing is added that is not in your record.

The false friends that cost dearly

“Formation” is not “formation” but “education” or “training”. “Expérience confirmée” is not “confirmed experience” but “proven experience”. “Société” is “company”, never “society”. “Actuellement” is “currently”, not “actually”, which turns a neutral sentence into an odd confession. “Stage” is “internship”. Each slip is tiny; their accumulation signs a text that was translated rather than written.

What disappears from the English-market resume

For the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United States and English-speaking Canada: no photo, no date of birth, no marital status, no nationality. These mentions, neutral elsewhere, create a legal risk there that employers remove by removing the file. The resume studio applies these removals automatically based on the target country; what matters is knowing they are not optional.

The final test

A successful English resume passes a simple test: read aloud by a native speaker, no sentence makes them slow down. Failing a native speaker at hand, Aptenda's review reopens the produced document and shows what screening software actually reads, in the job's language: the ad's exact words, found or missing, with no indulgence for approximate translation.

Numbers translate too

Numeric conventions change with the language: the thousands space becomes a comma, the decimal comma becomes a point, and "35 k€" does not read everywhere. Amounts are best stated in the target country's currency, at the local order of magnitude. Dates deserve the same care: "09/03" reads as 9 March in Paris and 3 September in New York; writing the month in letters removes the ambiguity. These details are not cosmetic: a misread number is a lost proof, and quantified proof is exactly what the English-market resume values most.