Foreign language fluencies on resume

[boy in a kilt]

I speak engineer and scientist. That should be on a resume.

One of my buddies is in the final stages of interviewing for a job with the State Department. He has a B.A. in Middle East Studies, speaks Arabic, Farsi, Japanese, Turkish, Urdu and Pashto. His second phone interview was all in Arabic.

I guess it depends on how you want to make your money.

[shootingstar]

There's a huge difference between being fluent in a language and being on the level of a simultaneous interpreter or translator. ........

My ex does translate documents for his work, but is more comfortable going from French/Spanish/Portuguese towards English. He does NOT do simultaneous interpretation. That takes formal training and just the right brain wiring. I do have a friend who was an intrepreter for the US State Department. He was born in Mississippi and lived in France for a few years. He just had a knack. He could do it French-English and English-French. He once had me try it English-English by watching the news and just repeating what the newscaster said in the same language. It was very difficult.

Yes, simultaneous interpretation/translation is impressive to see in action. In one of the organizations I worked for, we had a parelegal who was a multilingual court interpretator..Spanish and Portuguese /English. She held herself to a professional standard in terms of ethics, accuracy, etc. I have witnessed far too many situations where the translator from English to Chinese and vice versa, ended up translating and summarizing inaccurately, to give the real audience/respondent the more genuine flavour of what was truly said.

Some languages are quite difficult to learn as an adult...and IMHO, Chinese is one of them. I know 5 different Canadian friends and 1 sister who tried to learn to speak (Mandarin) and read Chinese as adults. All of these people are of Chinese descent, with mother tongue, Cantonese dialect family, not Mandarin....which is completely different.

They all had a tough time...much more difficult than for any of them to learn French when they were children.

I guess after knowing how some people got burned on claimed language fluencies, I still won't be adding it to my resume. You see, my mother speaks and understands only Chinese. That is my key personal benchmark...there are tough times in communication between her and all her adult children with their eroded fluency... sometimes the most critical things to express between parent and child cannot be communicated most accurately ..and it does create misunderstandings/conflict, like you wouldn't believe. So there is no way, I can claim fluency comfortably with others....who won't slow down for me...or don't speak in linguistic shortcut concepts like parents do in order to cope with their childrens' eroded fluencies.

But there is a certain amount of personal knowledge gained knowing from a non-English language, even if bastardized by now, that one knows certain cultural nuances are just tougher to translate accurately from Chinese to English. For instance, I find it hard to express ying-yang thing of different foods in English.

[tulip]

I have a good friend who was born in the US to a Polish mother and spoke alot of Polish as a child.

When she was in her 20s, she went to Poland with her mother, and she got a stomach virus. Her mom took her to the doctor, and the doctor asked her how she felt, and my friend, knowing only child-Polish, said something like, "My tummy-wummy hurts!"

Everyone had a good laugh over it. She works in international development and does put Polish on her resume, but does not claim to be fluent.

[spotlightmama]

Well, I'm a Certified Professional Resume Writer/former Recruiting Manager and I typically only list it if it's relevant. If you are trying to work in an international company or within a very diverse community where it might be helpful, then I would include it. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't list it.

[Dianyla]

I only list the language that I am fully fluent in, which is Spanish. I don't list "hobby languages" that I've dabbled in, like French, German, and Mandarin. I am fully prepared to be put on-the-spot by someone who wants to test my Spanish fluency, and this has happened before. I spent many years learning Spanish so that I would be able to use it professionally, so I'm absolutely going to list it as a skill.

What's really annoying is that, even though I'm fluent in medical spanish, I am not certified. When I volunteer at a clinic that helps out a lot of underserved Hispanic patients, I'm talking in Spanish all the time. When I'm volunteering at the Big Corporate Hospital, I have to follow protocols and call in the medical interpreter when speaking to any Hispanic patients. The interpreters are often very confused when they walk in the room to hear me chatting with the patient, and then I switch to English and start speaking through them for the official business stuff.

I speak engineer and scientist. That should be on a resume.

LOLZ!!!111!!! Oh hai, I speakz Lolcatz too!

[sgtiger]

...Oh hai, I speakz Lolcatz too!

Then maybiz you shouldz apply:
http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/web/650133387.html

[Dianyla]

Then maybiz you shouldz apply:
http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/web/650133387.html

OMG, that's awesome!

I love that the list of compensations include:
- Free pictures of cats
- Never having to use spellcheck again. Evar.

Schweet!

[bean fidhleir]

A useful knowledge of other languages can certainly be helpful today in a number of situations, so I used to include the other human languages I speak (Russian and German, mostly) in the laundry list of my qualifications. I don't think it ever actually mattered one way or another, though.

I couldn't possibly do simultaneous interpretation, but I did once spend a couple hours being pig-in-the-middle in a 4-language conversation between 2 Czechs and a monolingual American. I don't speak Czech (I can read a little) so I spoke to one of the Czechs in Russian, to the other in German, and to the American in English. The Czechs, of course, spoke to one another in Czech. It was quite the experience.

[malkin]

Years ago, working as a speech-pathologist for Head Start, I was observed chatting with some kids in Spanish, and some Numpty in management decided that I was competent to assess their language skills, and I was assigned this duty.

The truth of the matter was that if a 4 year old from a Spanish speaking family couldn't pass me up, the kid probably had a language delay. I was pretty good at keeping up with the 3 year olds, but pretty much hopeless communicating with the parents--fortunately most of them were generous, extremely kind, and probably amused by my endless bumbling of verb tenses.

I did not include this delightful experience in future resumes!!

[shootingstar]

Today, I just spoke Chinese (the dialect is part of the Cantonese family.) to my mother to wish her happy mother's day...which I said in English to her...cause I didn't know the right Chinese colloquial expression for it.

Every time I use my mother tongue which is gettin' rarer and rarer, I am simultaneously reminded how naturally....rusty I am. Oh well. She got my message. AFter I figured out what she said about her latest grandchild baby.

There is no way, I'll have the mother language fluency claim on my resume.

I guess for mother tongue language and fluency, I take it abit more seriously what I can or cannot say in the language. Within a family, it can have a powerful effect on quality on communication/miscommunication.