Persian Retail & E-Commerce Translation

About the Persian Language

Persian, also known by its endonym Farsi, is one of the Western Iranian languages within the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken in Iran, Afghanistan (officially known as Dari since 1958), and Tajikistan (officially known as Tajiki since the Soviet era), and some other regions which historically were Persianate societies and considered part of Greater Iran. It is written in the Persian alphabet, a modified variant of the Arabic script, which itself evolved from the Aramaic alphabet.

The Persian language is classified as a continuation of Middle Persian, the official religious and literary language of the Sasanian Empire, itself a continuation of Old Persian, the language of the Achaemenid Empire. A Persian-speaking person may be referred to as Persophone.

Throughout history, Persian has been a prestigious cultural language used by various empires in Western Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. Old Persian written works are attested in Old Persian cuneiform on several inscriptions from between the 6th and the 4th centuries BC, and Middle Persian literature is attested in Aramaic-derived scripts (Pahlavi and Manichaean) on inscriptions from the time of the Parthian Empire and in books centered in Zoroastrian and Manichaean scriptures from between the 3rd to the 10th century AD. New Persian literature began to flourish after the Arab conquest of Iran with its earliest records from the 9th century, since then adopting the Arabic script, while the use of Arabic had strikingly spread over the region. Persian was the first language to break through the monopoly of Arabic on writing in the Muslim world, with the writing of Persian poetry developed as a court tradition in many eastern courts. Some of the famous works of medieval Persian literature are the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, the works of Rumi, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the Panj Ganj of Nizami Ganjavi, the Divān of Hafez, The Conference of the Birds by Attar of Nishapur, and the miscellanea of Gulistan and Bustan by Saadi Shirazi.

Persian has left a considerable influence on its neighboring languages, including other Iranian languages, the Turkic languages, Armenian, Georgian and the Indo-Aryan languages (especially Urdu). It also exerted some influence on Arabic, particularly Bahrani Arabic, while borrowing much vocabulary from it under medieval Arab rule.

Persian Translation Expertise

Persian (Farsi) uses an elaborate system of formal and informal registers, with official documents employing a highly literary style rich in Arabic loanwords and complex compound verb constructions. The language lacks grammatical gender and has no articles, but its verb system is intricate with multiple tenses formed through prefixes and auxiliary verbs. Translators must also distinguish between Iranian Persian (Farsi), Afghan Persian (Dari), and Tajik Persian, which have diverged in vocabulary and orthographic conventions despite mutual intelligibility.

Persian uses a modified Arabic script with 32 letters, written right to left. It includes four additional letters not found in Arabic (pe, che, zhe, gaf) representing sounds absent from Arabic. Short vowels are generally not written, which means readers must infer pronunciation and sometimes meaning from context — a challenge when transliterating names into English.

Common Persian Documents

Persian documents commonly requiring translation include the shenāsnāmeh (identity booklet), gowāhināmeh (academic degree certificate), aghādnāmeh (marriage contract), and govāhi-e adam-e so’-e pishīneh (criminal record clearance).

NAATI certification for Persian (Farsi) is well established, with a substantial number of certified translators across Australia. Persian is one of the higher-demand NAATI language pairs, driven by significant Iranian and Afghan migration. NAATI treats Farsi and Dari as separate certifications.

About the Persian Language

Persian has remained remarkably stable over a millennium — educated speakers of modern Farsi can still read and understand the poetry of Ferdowsi's Shahnameh, written over 1,000 years ago, which would be like English speakers effortlessly reading Beowulf in the original Old English. The language deliberately purged many Arabic loanwords in the 20th century through the Farhangestan (Academy of Persian Language), coining native replacements — yet ironically, Persian grammar itself was never influenced by Arabic despite centuries of contact. Persian is one of the few languages in the world with a dedicated writing system that omits most vowels, meaning the same written word can potentially be read multiple ways depending on context.