This paper examines linguistic and metalinguistic factors that influence translation. The structure of the paper is as follows. First, I will briefly mention the linguistic approaches to translation. Then I will talk about translational universals at the background of linguistic universals. Other than linguistic issues, there are metalinguistic issues affecting translation. One of these metalinguistic issues is translator’s visibility in the text. The question is whether the translator should produce the TT in such a way that it cannot be recognized as a translation, or should the translator leave a trace of his own by means of foreignization (Venuti, 1995). The metalinguistic issues, especially the use of rhetorical devices, affecting translation become even more tangible when it comes to poetry. As Jones (2011) puts it, “Poetry translators are concerned to interpret a source poem's layers of meaning, to relay this interpretation reliably, and to ‘create a poem in the target language which is readable and enjoyable as an independent, literary text”. The paper ends with some broader discussion on untranslatable linguistic and metalinguistic features. These untranslatable features are not universal, but rather specific to each language pair. Some of these problems specific to Persian-English translations are discussed in the paper.