Centerpieces

I don't often find fabrications on resumes, but I sometimes see inflation. One place where it is easy to fluff up a resume is with foreign languages.

Second languages can be great assets to media outlets, but only when they are good enough to help us get or understand stories. If you have a second language, it's a selling point. If you're fluent, flaunt it. If you're halfway there, keep going. But don't claim proficiency you don't have.

Some people simply list the language. Others use modifiers. And that's where the fluff comes in.

When Vernon Smith was recruiting for the Dallas Morning News and encountered someone who claimed Spanish, he would switch the interview to Spanish. He caught a lot of people red-handed and tongue-tied. Their Spanish was not what they wanted him to believe.

That got me thinking. As someone who speaks only English, I had been asking people to tell me how good their language skills are. Why not ask for a demonstration, instead? Show is always better than tell.

So, when candidates claim a second language, I sometimes ask them to use that language to tell me about one of their clips. I can tell pretty quickly whether someone is fluent in another language. The starts, stops and gaps tell me whether this is someone I want to send out to ask questions -- or decipher answers -- in another language.

This impromptu language drill doesn't always work. Some people, already nervous to be in a job interview, get flustrated when asked to flip languages all of a sudden.

In a dinner conversation last fall, a senior at the Medill School of Journalism said it takes her a moment to get her head back into her native language. Another senior at the table said she was once interviewed by a recruiter who claimed proficiency in the student's native Mandarin. The recruiter happily switched out of English, eager to show what she knew. The student was so appalled at what came out of the recruiter's mouth that she scarcely knew what to say. She still thinks the poorly schooled recruiter must think the student does not know her own language.

As I listen, I find some who know they are inflating their proficiency and who quickly admit it. Most simply don't know how to state their abilities.

I asked some multi-lingual people to tell me what their various language descriptions meant.

On her resume, Tina Shah, a student at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, has, "Fluent in Gujarati, proficient in Hindi and conversational in Mandarin."

She elaborated: "I can speak Gujarati in my sleep and can understand it well enough to act as a translator. I learned Hindi through Hindo movies. While I can understand it, I don't have much practice speaking it, but I can speak it. Finally, Mandarin I studied one year. I cannot interview in Mandarin, but I can strike up a conversation."

Now, that is more helpful.

A student at the Missouri School of Journalism put down that, in addition to English, he had advanced Hungarian; intermediate Spanish and French; elementary Arabic (Levantine, Egyptian and Modern Standard Arabic) and German; and basic knowledge of Czech and Turkish.

How does he differentiate?

In Hungarian, he can interview, translate speech and text and write e-mails.

He could listen to a speech in French or Spanish and know what was going on, but "wouldn't want to bet my reporting career on it."

Elementary Arabic and German, to him, mean having a basic conversation and saying enough to indicate some appreciation for the culture.

Basic Czech and Turkish means knowing some greetings and "a lot of random words."

Another Missouri student put Arabic on her resume, too, but did not use a modifier. It turned out she was taking her first semester of Arabic and had been studying it for just six weeks.

There simply are no clearcut standards for describing language abilities.