Persian (Farsi) Technical Translation Services

Persian in American Industry: Diaspora Expertise and Legacy Paper

Demand for Persian technical translation services in the United States looks different from any other language pair we handle. There is little direct trade behind it. Instead, two forces drive the work: one of the most highly educated diasporas in the country, and a deep archive of technical paper left over from the era when American firms built much of Iran's modern infrastructure. Iranian Americans, concentrated in Southern California, Texas, and the DC area, are overrepresented in medicine and engineering, which means hospitals, device manufacturers, and engineering firms regularly need Farsi content for patients, employees, and professional credentialing.

The legacy archive is the quieter driver. Before 1979, US contractors delivered power plants, refineries, water systems, and aircraft fleets to Iran, all documented in English and Persian. Those files did not disappear. They resurface today in insurance claims, arbitration, export control investigations, academic research, and the personal records of emigres who ran those facilities. Turning a 1976 Persian operating log or an inspection card from an American-built substation into usable English evidence is a specialty of ours, and it demands translators who know both the period vocabulary and the equipment itself.

What We Translate, and What Sanctions Law Rules Out

Iran is subject to US sanctions under the Iranian Transactions and Sanctions Regulations, 31 CFR Part 560, administered by OFAC. We are direct about what that means for translation. Techniwords accepts Persian work for due diligence, sanctions compliance, denied-party screening support, litigation and arbitration, patent examination, journalism, academic research, and communication with Farsi-speaking audiences inside the United States. We do not accept projects whose purpose is to facilitate prohibited transactions with Iran, and our intake process asks the end-use question before a quote goes out, not after.

In practice, most of what crosses our desk is unambiguous: a compliance team needs an Iranian corporate registry extract in English, an examiner needs a Persian patent for prior art, a hospital needs device instructions for a Farsi-speaking patient. Where a request sits in gray territory, we tell the client to consult sanctions counsel first, and we have declined work on that basis. Clients dealing in regulatory submissions that contain Persian source data appreciate having a language partner who understands why the provenance of every exhibit matters.

Farsi to English: Engineering Reports, Patents, and Corporate Records

The bulk of our Persian volume flows into English. Law firms and investigators send Iranian corporate filings, customs records, and technical certificates for sanctions and fraud matters. Engineering consultancies send Persian-language structural assessments and geotechnical studies, often referencing Iran's seismic design code, Standard No. 2800, which has no direct US counterpart and needs careful annotation rather than silent substitution. When a client asks us to translate a full engineering report, the deliverable keeps the original clause numbering, stamps, and marginalia identified, because these documents usually end up as exhibits.

Patent work is a discipline of its own. Iran's patent office publishes in Persian, and prior-art searches for US examination or litigation sometimes hinge on a single Persian claim. Our patent translation team renders claims with the rigid literalism that patent counsel expects, flagging every point where Persian grammar leaves an antecedent ambiguous. Persian technical prose borrows heavily from French in older documents (a legacy of early twentieth-century engineering education) and from Arabic throughout, so dating a document by its vocabulary is often part of the job.

English to Farsi: Medical Devices and the US Audience

Work into Farsi is aimed almost entirely at audiences inside the United States. Hospitals and clinics in Los Angeles, Houston, and the Washington area serve large Farsi-speaking patient populations, and manufacturers respond with translated instructions for use, patient guides, and informed consent forms. FDA human factors thinking applies regardless of language: an IFU that confuses a Farsi-speaking patient is a use-error risk, so we test readability with native speakers rather than assuming a correct translation is automatically a clear one. Our medical device translation practice supplies linguists with clinical backgrounds for this content.

Employers come to us as well. Utilities and engineering firms with Iranian-American staff translate safety orientations and HR-critical policies, and licensing boards require certified English renderings of Iranian engineering degrees and transcripts. For credential work we provide certified translations with signed accuracy statements through the process described on this page.

Language access law adds a layer many device and healthcare clients underestimate. Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act obliges covered entities to provide meaningful access for limited-English-proficient patients, and Farsi ranks among the threshold languages under California managed-care rules. That is why a device maker shipping nationwide may need a Farsi tagline and translated core labeling even though Iran itself is closed as a market. We maintain a Farsi glossary of anatomical and device terminology for this recurring scenario, so successive IFU revisions stay consistent across product generations.

Right to Left, With Exceptions: Script, Numerals, and the Half-Space

Persian is written right to left in a modified Arabic script with four letters Arabic does not have: پ, چ, ژ, and گ. That modification is why generic Arabic fonts and keyboards mangle Farsi text. The complications multiply in technical documents, which are never purely right-to-left: part numbers, formulas, units, and English acronyms embed left-to-right runs inside RTL paragraphs, and bad bidirectional handling silently reverses digit groups or flips a tolerance like 10-15 mm into 15-10 mm. Every Farsi deliverable we produce goes through a bidirectional QA pass in the final file format.

Three more traps deserve naming:

• Persian digits. Farsi uses its own numerals (۰ through ۹), and three of them are drawn differently from the Arabic-Indic set used in Arabic text. Data tables must commit to one system consistently.
• The decimal separator. Standard Persian uses the momayyez (٫), not the period, so 3.5 becomes ۳٫۵ in formal text.
• The half-space. Correct Persian orthography depends on the zero-width non-joiner to separate word elements without breaking lines; software that strips it produces text every literate reader recognizes as wrong.

Because so much of this is a layout problem as much as a language problem, Farsi projects with formatted deliverables run through our technical desktop publishing service, where RTL InDesign and FrameMaker work is done by operators who read the script.

Iranian Persian, Dari, and Tajik: One Language, Three Standards

Persian is pluricentric. Iranian Persian (Farsi) is the standard for Iran and its diaspora; Dari is the Afghan standard, mutually intelligible but distinct in pronunciation, vocabulary, and official terminology; Tajik is written in Cyrillic and shaped by a century of Russian contact. A single "Persian" translation cannot serve all three audiences well. Technical vocabulary splits noticeably: Iranian Persian coins terms through the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, while Dari retains more English and older borrowings, and Tajik reaches for Russian.

We ask one question at intake: who reads this? A patient guide for Iranian Americans gets Farsi. A training package for Afghan mechanics gets Dari, from Dari-native linguists. Materials for Tajikistan get Cyrillic-script Tajik. Where a US agency or NGO genuinely needs to reach Farsi and Dari speakers with one document, we prepare a carefully neutral text and disclose the trade-offs, but we never present that compromise as the default. The distinction also runs through our related pairs; teams working across the region often combine this service with Arabic technical translation for Gulf-facing documentation, and the language pages hub lists every pair we staff.

Standards and Conventions Inside Iranian Technical Documents

Documents originating in Iran cite a standards ecosystem most American engineers have never met. National standards are issued by INSO, the Iranian National Standardization Organization, whose older designation ISIRI still appears on decades of certificates and test reports. Construction documents reference the National Building Regulations of Iran, organized in numbered chapters covering everything from structural loading to electrical installations, alongside the seismic code Standard No. 2800 mentioned above. A translator who quietly replaces these references with ASTM or IBC citations is not simplifying the document; they are falsifying it. Our rule is to preserve the original designation and, where the client requests, add a bracketed note identifying the nearest US or ISO analog.

The engineering conventions differ too, in ways that affect how numbers should be read:

• Iran is fully metric, and drawings dimension in millimeters; loads appear in kilograms-force and kilonewtons in older and newer documents respectively.
• The electrical grid runs at 230 V and 50 Hz, so equipment specifications translated for US comparison need that context stated, not assumed.
• Rebar, steel profiles, and pipe schedules follow European-derived designations rather than American ones, and a bar mark on an Iranian structural drawing maps to a diameter, not a US bar number.
• Official documents are dated in the Solar Hijri calendar, so a test certificate marked 1398 was issued in 2019-20.

We compile these conversions into a project-specific reference sheet delivered with the translation, which spares the receiving engineer from re-deriving them file by file.

How We Qualify a Farsi Technical Translator

The American Translators Association does not currently offer certification for the English-Persian pair, so a certificate cannot do the screening for us. Our bar for a Farsi technical translator therefore rests on verifiable subject-matter history: a civil engineer who practiced in Tehran before emigrating, a pharmacist who now translates clinical content, a former patent office examiner. Candidates complete a paid test translation drawn from genuine project files, scored blind by our senior Persian reviewer against a defined error typology covering accuracy, terminology, register, and bidirectional formatting.

Direction discipline is strict. Into-Farsi work goes to translators living inside the language, who know what current Tehran or diaspora usage sounds like; into-English work goes to linguists whose English is native-grade, because an engineering report full of translationese will not survive expert-witness scrutiny. Both directions are revised independently by a second qualified linguist under our ISO 17100-compliant process, a structure we apply to every pair and describe further on our technical translator page.

Process and Pricing at a Persian Translation Company

Fifteen years of running rare and sensitive pairs from our Texas base has produced a settled routine. Files arrive, the end-use check runs, and a project manager returns an itemized quote within one business hour. As a Persian translation company we price the pair above common European combinations, typically $0.15–0.22 per word, reflecting the small pool of qualified specialists; certified and expert-witness work carries a premium, and legacy documents with degraded handwriting are quoted after a sample review rather than sight unseen. Members of ATA and GALA, we treat confidentiality as a default: Persian projects frequently involve litigation or investigations, so NDAs, restricted teams, and US-only data handling are available on request.

One recent matter illustrates the shape of the work. A claims team held 60 pages of handwritten Persian maintenance logs from an American-built pumping station, dated 1974 to 1978. Our translator, a mechanical engineer educated in pre-revolution Iran, reconstructed the maintenance history in English with every ambiguous reading footnoted, and opposing counsel stipulated to the translation without challenge. That is the standard an experienced Persian technical translation agency should be able to meet, and it is the one we hold ourselves to on every file.