The Safavid era (1501 -1736) saw the flowering of Shi'i literary culture and intellectual life supported by an ambitious translation movement. This movement resulted in Persian translation of almost all major Shi'i works written in Arabic before the Safavids as well as works from a diverse range of fields in other languages. This effort represented a collective and sustained societal effort, from Shahs to scholars, rather than an individual and ephemeral phenomenon. In this regard, as Iranian scholar Muhammad Riza Husayni has suggested in his short essay published in 2014, this translation movement can be considered analogous to the translation movement of the Abbasid era. Although some research, such as Rula J. Abisaab’s book, Converting Persia (2004) and the short essays of Muhsin Nasirabadi (2001) and Muhammad Riza Husayni (2014), has been published on Persian translations of Shi'ite works, the translations of non-Shi'ite religious, technical, and philosophical works have mostly remained unexplored. This paper will highlight the importance of non-Shi‘ite works among the host of significant works translated into Persian as a part of the Safavid translation movement. These include, Ihya’ ‘ulum al-din by Abu Hamid al-Ghazali, al-Shifa by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Tarikh al-Hukama by Ibn al-Qifti, from Arabic, and Badayi‘ al-handasa, a work on geometry from Latin. In addition to these works, the four gospels of the New Testament and linguistic works to instruct Persian for Turkish-speaking peoples were also translated into Persian in Safavid Iran. This paper uses the theoretical framework of translation studies the translators’ own accounts of their work, as well as numerous Persian catalogues, chronicles, and bibliographical works. Moreover, it seeks to discern the inner workings and motivations behind the translations of these sort of works and suggests that pragmatic considerations and religious motivations played important roles in the translation movement.