A recruiter reading your CV is not grading your grammar. They are doing something faster and less forgiving: deciding, in a handful of seconds, whether you sound like someone who already works in their world. A CV in second language territory can be technically flawless and still fail that test, because the problem is rarely the words. It is the shape of the sentences, the choice of job title, the register, the things that quietly signal "this was written somewhere else and moved here".
That is fixable, and it does not require perfect fluency. It requires knowing which mistakes recruiters notice.
Why literal translation reads badly
Write your CV in your own language and convert it, and you carry over more than vocabulary. You carry the rhythm of professional writing in your culture, and rhythms do not travel.
French professional prose likes long, subordinated sentences with a formal frame. Rendered word for word, that becomes a bullet like "Was in charge of the coordination of the various actors involved in the deployment of the new system" - grammatically fine, and immediately foreign to a recruiter who expects "Coordinated the rollout of the new system across four teams". Spanish CV writing often opens with a paragraph describing the person in the third person; dropped into an English CV it reads as oddly detached.
The tells are consistent:
Sentences that start too far from the verb. "Within the framework of a project aiming at the improvement of..." is the classic translated opening. Target-language CV writing puts the action first.
Nominalisation. Your language may favour nouns where the target favours verbs. "Realisation of the migration" instead of "Migrated". A CV full of abstract nouns reads as a report about someone rather than a claim by someone.
Connectors that do not belong. "Indeed", "moreover", "in effect" scattered through bullets are imported from essay writing in another language. Bullets are a list, not an argument.
Adjectives that were fine at home. "Dynamic", "motivated", "rigorous", "serious" are standard self-descriptors in several European CV traditions and land as empty in English. "Rigorous" in particular is a word people apply to methods, not to themselves.
Politeness formulas. A closing line thanking the reader for their attention is normal in some cover-letter traditions and out of place on a CV.
None of these are errors a spellchecker flags. All are visible to a native reader within a line or two.
Job titles that do not map
This is where most people lose the most information. Titles are compressed descriptions of a role inside a specific labour market, and the same words can mean different seniority in two countries. A French "cadre" has no clean English equivalent, because it describes a contractual status as much as a job. "Ingenieur d'affaires" is closer to sales than the word engineer suggests. A "responsable" can be a team lead or a department head. In Spanish-speaking markets, "licenciado" does not sit neatly on the bachelor/master line, and "gerente" covers a range "manager" only partly overlaps.
The other direction is just as messy: an American "Vice President" in finance may be mid-level, and "Associate" means junior in some firms, senior in others.
Three workable strategies, depending on how load-bearing the title is:
Use the target-market equivalent when the role genuinely maps. If you were a "charge de clientele" in a bank and the local market calls that a Relationship Manager, write Relationship Manager. You are not inflating anything, just naming the same job in the reader's language.
Keep the original and gloss it when the title is distinctive. Write the original, then a short bracketed explanation in the target language. This works for public-sector roles, regulated professions and internal grades. The gloss should describe scope: "equivalent to a mid-level project manager, budget responsibility" tells the reader more than a dictionary equivalent.
Add a scope line when the title is genuinely untranslatable. Let the first bullet do the work: team size, budget, reporting line, region covered. Recruiters read scope faster than titles anyway.
What to avoid: inventing a title better than the one you held, translating a title into something that implies a licence you do not have, and leaving a title in the original with no explanation. That last one is the most common: a recruiter who gets no help assumes the smaller interpretation. Company names deserve the same care: if your employer is a household name at home and unknown abroad, a five-word descriptor after the name stops the reader filing it as a small local outfit.
Stating your language level honestly
Language claims are the part of a CV most likely to be tested in the first minutes of a call. Overstating is a bad trade: it buys an interview you then perform badly in.
The CEFR scale (A1 through C2) is the cleanest instrument, because it is calibrated rather than self-flattering. B2 means you can handle a professional conversation with occasional effort. C1 means you can work in the language without it being a topic. C2 is near-native and should be rare on a CV. Below B1, do not list it at all.
The Anglophone vocabulary is vaguer, and recruiters read these terms with specific expectations.
"Native" means you grew up in it. Do not use it for a language you learned as an adult, however well.
"Bilingual" implies two languages at near-native level, usually from childhood. It is claimed far more often than it is true, so some recruiters discount it.
"Fluent" is the most abused word on CVs. To a recruiter it means: can run a meeting, handle a difficult phone call, write a client email without help. If you would struggle with an unscripted twenty-minute conversation about your own field, you are not there yet.
"Professional working proficiency" is the honest, slightly unglamorous middle: I work in this language daily, I am effective, I am not perfect. "Conversational" means social competence without professional depth, which is fine for a third or fourth language.
Put the level near the top if the job requires the language, in a short block near the bottom if it does not. Name the certification and year if you have one: a dated test result is verifiable in a way self-assessment is not. And if you have used the language at work, say where: "worked in English daily with distributed teams" carries more weight than any label.
One signal you cannot fake is the CV itself. If you claim C1 and the document is full of translated idioms, the claim damages you rather than helping.
False friends and register
False friends survive proofreading because every individual word is real.
French to English: "actuellement" is currently, not actually. "Eventuellement" is possibly, not eventually. "Formation" is training or education. "Assister a" means attend, not assist. "Sensible" means sensitive. "Demander" is to ask, not to demand - and "I demanded a meeting with the client" reads aggressively.
Spanish to English: "actualmente" again is currently. "Carrera" is a degree programme, not a career in the English sense. "Realizar" is to carry out, while "realise" mostly means to become aware. "Compromiso" is commitment, not compromise, and the difference matters on a CV. "Exito" is success, not exit.
Register is subtler and does more damage in aggregate. Two failure modes:
Over-formality. Learners reach for the most formal register they know, because formal feels safe. In English that produces a stiff, legalistic voice: "hereby", "aforementioned", "utilise" instead of "use", "in order to" where "to" would do. English professional writing has moved plain, and plain reads as confident.
Over-casualness. The mirror error, usually made by people who learned the language from media rather than workplaces. Contractions, exclamation marks, "super proud of" or "we crushed it" on a CV headed to a conservative sector. The language is not wrong; the register is misjudged for the document.
Translated idioms almost never survive the trip. A French candidate writing "I put my hands in the dough" for hands-on experience, or a Spanish speaker writing "I threw the house out the window" for a big launch, produces a sentence the reader has to decode. If you have never seen a phrase in a local CV, do not use it.
Verb tense and bullet style
English CVs use past tense for previous roles and present tense for the current one, with the subject dropped: "Led a team of six", not "I led a team of six" and not "Leading a team of six" for a finished job. Starting every bullet with the same three verbs is the other trap: vary them, and prefer specific verbs (negotiated, rebuilt, automated, reduced) over generic ones (managed, worked on, was responsible for).
French CVs tolerate the infinitive or the noun form more readily, and complete sentences with "je" are still unusual. Spanish CVs generally follow the same subject-less pattern as English, though the third-person profile paragraph remains more common than an Anglophone reader expects.
Bullet punctuation is a small thing a native eye catches: pick one convention, terminal period or none, and hold it. Numbers and dates need converting too. A CV that says 1.500 for one thousand five hundred confuses an English reader who reads it as one point five. Spell out the unit if there is any ambiguity, and use the local date format. Capitalisation is another giveaway: English capitalises job titles more liberally than French or Spanish, so a French CV in English with lowercase titles looks slightly off, and an English CV in French with Every Word Capitalised looks worse.
What to run past a native speaker, and what tools can do
Machine translation has got good enough to be dangerous. It produces text that is grammatically correct and tonally wrong, the one failure mode you cannot detect in a language you do not fully control.
Where tools genuinely help: word choice, prepositions, whether a phrase exists at all in the target language, spelling, and a rough first pass you then rewrite. Reverse-translating a sentence back into your own language is a decent smell test: if it comes back mangled, the target version was odd.
Where they fail: register, idiom, seniority signals in titles, and anything that depends on what a local recruiter expects. A tool will happily translate your title literally and give you something no one in that market has ever been called.
What to ask a native speaker, in priority order. First, the job titles: does each one land at the seniority you actually held? Second, the summary or profile, the most rhetorical part and the easiest to get tonally wrong. Third, three or four bullets picked at random, asking "does this sound like a person who works here wrote it?" rather than "is this correct?". Correct is a low bar. Natural is the bar.
Ideally that reader works in your sector in that country. A native-speaker friend in another field will catch the idiom and miss the title problem, which is the more expensive one.
Format questions, briefly
Length, photo, date of birth and marital status are country conventions, not language questions, and they vary sharply. Some markets expect a photo and consider its absence odd; others treat it as a compliance risk and strip it. Check the guidance for the specific country rather than assuming your home format travels. Do not let a format choice flag you as an outsider before anyone reads a word.
Self-check before you send
Read the whole CV aloud in the target language. Anywhere you stumble, the reader will too.
Then work through this list. Does every job title communicate the seniority you actually had, either directly or through a gloss? Is your language level a claim you could defend in a live conversation? Are your tenses consistent and your bullets subject-less? Did you check the false friends specific to your language pair? Are punctuation, numbers and dates in the target format throughout? Has one native speaker in your sector read the titles and the summary?
Last, the honest question. If someone handed you this document and said it was written by a local candidate, would you believe them? If the answer is no, find the two or three sentences responsible. Writing cv in foreign language work fails in specific places, not everywhere at once.