Before starting to address all the questions regarding the form of our résumé, we have to decide what we are going to include and what we are going to leave out. Résumés, as all other communicative acts, are culture-bound so, depending on a number of cultural factors, you may have certain ideas about what a résumé should be like and, as we work on an international market, the odds are that your potential client will have his or her own expectations as well. So how do we bridge this cultural gap? One option is to resort to a utilitarian approach: What information will be useful to the other party in deciding if they want to use our services, and what will not? Information will be useful if it serves one of the following purposes:
If a piece of information serves at least one of these purposes, then it might be worth including. Let’s see how some of the data most usually included in résumés fit these categories:
Data that don’t fulfill any of the criteria mentioned above, and that should therefore be left out, include, among others, picture, marital status, number of children, date and place of birth, age, tax information, primary and secondary school education, computer hardware, knowledge of basic software (such as Windows, Office, Firefox or Adobe Reader), personal objectives, etc. If we stick to these criteria, we should have a good starting point for the selection of contents for our résumé and we will be constructing ourselves as effective communicators, which is always a plus for freelance translators.
Does your résumé fulfill these criteria?