Iran’s ICRO Launches a Campaign to Translate Islamic Books Worldwide
At a summit of translators convened under the banner of Optimization Promotion, the head of the Islamic Culture and Relations Organization announced that the body had launched a translation campaign aimed at spreading Islamic knowledge and thought across the world. The statement was brief. Its implications, for anyone who works with books and languages for a living, are not.
The ICRO is Iran's main cultural outreach agency. It runs cultural centres attached to Iranian embassies, organises book fairs, and funds the movement of Persian-language texts into other languages. What the summit made clear is that this work is being reorganised into something more deliberate than a scattering of individual projects.
A bill, a mandate and a bureaucracy
The Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution ratified a bill to organise the translation and publication of books on Islamic knowledge and the humanities. Responsibility for meeting the requirements of that bill was devolved to the ICRO. That single sentence describes a familiar pattern in state-backed cultural policy: a legislature sets an objective, and an agency inherits the operational headache.
The headache is real. Translating a serious work of philosophy or jurisprudence is not the same as translating a brochure. A translator needs the source language, the target language, and a working command of the subject matter. Find someone who has all three and can write readable prose, and you have found someone rare.
Ali Asghar Saberi, supervisor of the organising centre for the translation and publication of Islamic and humanities sciences, said the formation of specialised translation groups was one of the main goals of the gathering. He added that analysing different books, assessing them for translation, and identifying the best works to render into other languages were among the centre's core missions. Rendering Persian books into the world's languages, he said, is a cultural necessity.
Selection is the hardest part
Note what Saberi put first. Not translation itself, but selection. Deciding which books deserve the investment is where most state translation programmes succeed or fail. A committee that picks only works of official doctrine produces a shelf nobody outside the ministry will read. A committee that picks what foreign readers actually want risks losing the point of the exercise.
The numbers explain the pressure. UNESCO's Index Translationum, the closest thing the world has to a translation census, shows a market dominated by a handful of source languages. English supplies the overwhelming majority of translated titles worldwide. German, French and Russian follow at some distance. Persian sits far down the list, despite a literary tradition running from Ferdowsi and Rumi to the modern novel. That gap is the whole reason a campaign like this exists.
Ahrefs data puts the demand side in perspective. Roughly 1,400 people a month search for persian to english translation in the United States alone, and around 1,000 look for book translation services. These are not vanity metrics. They are readers, students, publishers and researchers looking for a route into texts they cannot read themselves.
Why specialised groups matter
The decision to build specialised translation groups rather than hire freelancers case by case reflects something translators have argued for decades. Consistency across a body of work depends on shared terminology. If one translator renders a theological term one way and a second renders it another, a reader comparing two volumes from the same programme will conclude, reasonably, that neither can be trusted.
Agencies that handle long-running projects solve this with glossaries and translation memory databases that store approved renderings and surface them automatically. Those tools are standard among professional translation services handling technical and legal material, and they apply just as well to a multi-volume philosophy series.
The literary problem underneath
Persian literature carries a formal register, dense allusion and a poetic tradition that resists literal rendering. Translators who work into English from Persian talk about the same difficulty translators of classical Arabic and Sanskrit describe: a sentence that is transparent to its original audience arrives in English carrying either too much explanation or not enough. Footnote everything and the prose dies. Footnote nothing and the reader is lost.
Practitioners argue about this constantly. On Reddit's r/TranslationStudies community, threads on domestication versus foreignisation, and on how much cultural scaffolding a translator owes the reader, run for hundreds of comments. There is no settled answer, which is exactly why a programme that ignores the question tends to produce unreadable books.
There is also a practical question of who does the work. A translation programme of this scale needs people who grew up speaking the target language, because prose written by a non-native speaker reads as slightly wrong in ways no editor can fully repair. That means recruiting abroad, paying market rates, and accepting that the best candidates may hold views the commissioning body dislikes. Programmes that refuse to make that trade tend to end up with grammatically correct books nobody finishes.
Books as foreign policy
None of this is unique to Iran. State-funded translation is a standard instrument of cultural diplomacy. The Goethe-Institut subsidises German titles abroad. The Institut Francais does the same for French. South Korea's Literature Translation Institute spent years funding English versions of Korean novels before Han Kang won the Nobel Prize, and the groundwork was visible in hindsight. Every one of these programmes rests on the same wager: that a book read in translation builds a durable relationship no press release can buy.
The ICRO campaign will be judged the same way. Not on how many volumes it commissions, but on whether foreign publishers pick them up, whether university libraries order them, and whether anyone outside the programme's own circle reads them a decade from now. The bill has been passed and the mandate handed down. The translators, as usual, will decide whether it works.