Enum Display Extension

In response to Adrian Cole's comment to the OP - due to living and working in a country where there are four official languages, plus English as a de facto fifth, I've encountered this before.

Provided you have the corresponding .resx files embedded in the same assembly as the enum and your enum values correspond to the resource names in those files, you can do the following:

Create a bog-standard enum without attributes:

//standard enum
public enum EmployeeType
{
    Boss,
    AdministrativeAssistant,
    Janitor,
    StandardEmployee
}

And create an extension method that uses the enum value as the key for the .NET Framework to look up the appropriate language string:

//Enum Extension class
public static class EnumExtensions
{
    //Gets the localized string representation of the enum value
    public static string ToLocalizedString(this Enum value)
    {
        var resourceManager = new ResourceManager(Type.GetType(
            string.Format("{0}.{1}Strings", 
            value.GetType().Namespace, value.GetType().Name)));
 
        var localizedString = resourceManager.GetString(value.ToString());
 
        return string.IsNullOrEmpty(localizedString) ? value.ToString() : localizedString;
    }
}

Then all you need to do to get a localized string in place of the enum value is:

var localized = EmployeeType.Boss.ToLocalizedString();

And for converting a localized string back to the enum, you call an extension method on the string:

//string extension method
public static T FromLocalizedString<T>(this string localizedString)
{
   var t = typeof (T);
 
   var resourceType = Type.GetType(string.Format("{0}.{1}Strings", 
                                   t.Namespace, t.Name));
 
   var enumObject = resourceType.GetProperties()
       .Where(p => p.GetValue(null, null) != null && 
              p.GetValue(null, null).ToString() == localizedString)
       .DefaultIfEmpty(null)
       .FirstOrDefault();
 
   return enumObject == null ? default(T) : (T)Enum.Parse(t, enumObject.Name);
}

like this:

var boss = "Chef".FromLocalizedString<EmployeeType>();