One of the most interesting points to note about Farsi is the fact it’s actually an Indo-European language at its heart. While it might not bear much resemblance at first to the Romantic, Germanic or Slavic languages, they all share a common ancestry. In fact modern Farsi contains a number of French adaptations and is also significantly influenced by the Russian language. English is also playing an increasingly important role on the development of modern Farsi, though like many other world languages coming into direct and persistent contact with the English language Farsi speakers are developing their own equivalents of this potentially intrusive vocabulary.
Probably the biggest point of confusion when English speakers attempt to understand the connections between Farsi and other Indo-European languages is the fact that Farsi doesn’t use the Latin alphabet. Farsi utilizes some Cyrillic writing but overall spells out their words using a modified version of Arabic script which incorporates more letters and changes in the pronunciation of many shared letters. While Farsi can be written in the Latin alphabet, the majority of Farsi documents are written in script. Understandably this is a major point of contention among English speakers attempting English to Farsi translation or Farsi-English translations.
There are a few grammatical differences between Farsi and English that make Farsi translation tricky as well. Perhaps most notable is the Farsi reliance on transitive and intransitive verbs. Simply put in English the subject of a sentence is placed front and center, while in Farsi the subject of a sentence is more likely to appear attached as a pronoun connected to the sentence’s verb. The order of adverbs and adjectives are also reversed in Farsi compared to English. One other point of common contention between Farsi and English speaker is the lack of grammatical gender within Farsi nouns. Overall the main grammatical difference between Farsi and English is that the former utilizes a Subject-Object-Verb word order, while the latter uses a Subject-Verb-Object word order.
While learning Farsi may not be as hard as you think, overall it’s a smarter idea to hire a professional if you’re in need of quality Farsi translations. It’s possible to get a workable understanding of the language in a short period of time, but even more than most languages Farsi contains a large amount of subtleties and cultural inflections that go beyond its basic grammatical structure and vocabulary. Thankfully finding a qualified Farsi translator is much easier than finding a translator for other languages with less than a hundred million speakers.