toury (1978:200) believes that translation is a kind of activity which inevitably involves at least two languages and two cultural traditions. being polite while asking for something takes place differently in different cultures and languages, therefore various strategies may be applied for making requests and also translation of them in order not to disturb or threaten the face or better to say independency of hearer. the core aim of study is to describe shifts of politeness strategies in translation of indirect requests from english to persian. therefore, the researcher provided 20 indirect requests for 40 male and female participants who were studying ma in english and asked them to translate the items. items were from 5 different english movies and the researcher analyzed the translations one by one to see what are the shifts in politeness strategies, happened in translation of the requests. results and findings showed that shift from one strategy to another is not so common and it did not take place in most of the translations. the most common shift was shift from giving deference (gdff) into apologize (apg) with a frequency of 20 cases. in addition, there were other shifts but their frequency were very low. moreover, there was shift from negative politeness strategy to positive politeness strategy. this shift happened in translation of be pessimistic (pess) strategy into being optimistic(opt) which is a subcategory of positive politeness.